Occasionally, a carefully planned dog training lesson… will turn out to be a mess.
That is because every dog has a vote in terms of how things are going to go. Thus, in the middle portion of one of my lessons this morning, what I was trying to do went sideways.
Now, I’m not saying that the dog was harmed in any way, or that the lesson didn’t recover. The lesson turned out well, but just not the way I had planned originally. I began this lesson with a vision in my head of what we (the owner and myself) were going to do. I had done this same type of lesson with many dogs before. But when we got into working him… everything just wasn’t working.
In this case, the dog was more interested in focusing on a basketball flying and going into a hoop on a nearby court rather than working silly Sit, Down, Come and Heel skills. I imagine we looked like dummies to observers at that moment as this dog kept staring, lunging and whining to get to that basketball.
We still got the dog to Down one time for a treat for a short moment, with a lot of coaxing, but that was not getting us anywhere. So, out came a favorite toy. Then everything sorted out. The dog voted against the original plan, but then voted for the new plan. We were then out of the mess.
Anyone who trains dogs has these moments. However, not everyone makes changes when the tools being used aren’t getting the expected results. Abraham Maslow wrote, “it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” If you are so committed to just one approach, then you are just going to keep hammering on that approach regardless of whether the dog is making any progress. If you want humane, good results the training must fit the dog, the dog shouldn’t have to fit the training. You need to be smarter, not tougher. Some programs train every dog the same way, but not all dogs adapt to being trained the same way that other dogs were trained. I can think of a dog like this. The dog wasn’t better after leaving that program. The dog is still a mess.
Funny thing, the first few minutes of the lesson, petting and praise were working. Then the man with the basketball showed up, and the dog started tuning us out. We then switched to treats, and that worked once. What I wasn’t going to do is start punishing the dog. I then rotated into prey drive, and that stopped the mess.
I teach students to exercise patience with their dogs and to sort them out. Impatience often results in unjustified punishments and paybacks from the handler. I teach ways to work out messes and counsel students to not let their egos get in the way. Today we had a momentary mess, but we switched how we were doing things, and the mess went away.