The cognitive Canine
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latest blog post
Jumping to Aversives
Today I am thinking about an 11 year old kid who invented a leash to stop leash pulling. You’ve heard the story. The system delivered electric stimulation to the dog if the dog pulled. He was nationally recognized and asked to bring his invention to a contest or...
Can you fix it?
Dog owners and trainers alike face behaviors in their beloved four-leggeds that cause them stress. Barking and lunging on leash, bolting out open doors, snatching food from counters, and the list goes on! Dogs do all kinds of dog things that are hard for humans to...
Close Calls
When my first border collie Kelso was a baby, around 12 weeks old, somebody tried to steal him from my backyard. My sister saw the hands reach into the fence and grab at him, she screamed out the window, they let go, and he ran for the house. They had actually removed...
Much Ado About Sniffing
I once wrote in-depth about what functions sniffing serves and why it's such a vital part of dogdom and one to be respected. You can find that HERE. Please read it first. So why am I here, writing about it again? A friend's facebook thread asking "what can we do about...
agility stress dreams and other hard things
Have you ever had an agility stress dream? Maybe you're at [insert major big event here] and you missed your walk through? Or you're walking the course at [major big event] and you just can't get it figure out, and the clock is running down. Or your crating area is...
Microskills: Toys
In this microskills post I'm going to cover some really basic toy skills that we, if we are going to use toys to train, really need. It is really sexy right now to use multiple markers for toys and while I do find this concept really helpful, I do feel that trying to...
Reinforcer Microskills: Foodstuff
More Microskills today! If you didn’t read my first post in this series, you can check it out here. The next set of Microskills that I find really vital is that of reinforcer skills. We don’t often think about investing a lot of time into training the reinforcement...
Microskills
I have been talking with clients a lot lately about a concept I am calling “miscroskills.” Microskills are the tiny elements that make up most of our future behaviors–they are the skills that make it easy for our dog to learn anything else. I would divide microskills into three categories: behaviors, reinforcers, and life. Here are the behavior microskills I find the most valuable, in no particular order…
Shaping, a Puppy Elementary Post
This post originally appeared as a part of Puppy Elementary and was password-protected. For more posts like this, join now! Ahhh, that elusive skill! Shaping by successive approximation aka "shaping" or "free shaping" is really just training in my book. I...