What is the main difference between how I view puppy lessons and adult dog lessons?
Here is my condensed version.
The younger the dog, the earliest experiences and learning start with stimulating and guiding unconditioned behaviors and stimulating basic innate neural mechanisms. With older dogs, the training becomes more perceptual, drawing upon that foundation to then use higher nervous system processes.
Here’s how I interpret this from a human point of view. I think I was ripped off in school. For example, we should have been walked through the major portion of classical literature before graduating high school. That knowledge, and discussions surrounding it, would have been good for me. When I graduated from college, I realized there were big gaps in what I needed to know. I started out reading a lot of history. I have picked up some literature along the way, but I haven’t nearly read what I think I should know. There is a reason why classical literature is important. The authors took an important concept and worked it over in a fictional construct. Paradise Lost, for example.
Here’s how I implement this with puppies. I give them a wide range of experiences. My long-term thinking is that those puppies will then have a good foundation for more difficult tasks later through associative learning.
As a little kid, it was Wild Kingdom (Mutual of Omaha) with Marlon Perkins on the weekends. I would go over to my grandparent’s apartment, and while my grandmother was cooking dinner, my grandfather and I would play Poker, Blackjack, Gin Rummy, or Checkers and watch Wild Kingdom. She usually either made meatloaf or thin fried strips of round steak. Then we’d have some kind of vegetable and some kind of potato. And then occasionally my grandfather would pull out the ice cream maker and so he’d mix it all up and we would turn it until it was ready (he was the one with the muscles). He would also take me on walks to the park and I would mess with plants, sticks, leaves, pick the random clover (looking for the 4-leaf kind). Great memories.
When I was a kid, we lived in the suburbs of Illinois. Back then, the housing was new, and there were still farming fields. So, a lot of the wildlife I messed with were bugs… caterpillars, moths, honeybees, bumble bees, the occasional hornet, ants, spiders (unfortunately, many a black or red ant met an untimely death in a spider web). While in grade school, except when I was in school or at night to sleep or for meals, my brother and I were outdoors almost the whole time either fooling around with stuff like that or putting together neighborhood ball games or making the occasional fort.
When we moved to Seattle, same thing: my brother and I were outdoors most of the time during the day with our free time. It wasn’t directly focused on nature. It’s just that’s what we did. When we moved to Seattle, our parents would take us to wade in the Issaquah creek (don’t do that today, it is a filthy mess), to catch crawdads and try to touch some trout with our fingers. We would go into the hills behind our house and pick berries and bring them home for mom to make blackberry pies, or we’d catch snakes, salamanders or tree frogs. And then, as I was in high school and beyond, in college, most of the time was outdoors, shooting hoops, driving around, going for walks or hikes, going to Alki beach for fish and chips, or down at the Ol’ Curiosity Shop to browse the trinkets (ever see The Lord’s Prayer on a single rice kernel?).
I think that all that outdoor time by osmosis gave me lots of experience that I probably draw upon today that I don’t even realize. I have mentioned before how I started training with my first dog, Kate, the Bouvier. She was then incorporated into my lifestyle, and we went everywhere.
Since I wasn’t a hunter, I haven’t spent as much time in the wild with large predatory or prey mammals. I think that is a distinct advantage for those who have had that opportunity. But we were raised in suburban environments and didn’t have those experiences, so I’ve had to fill in the blanks over the years. If we had some time in rural America, and some time on a farm, that would have been invaluable today.
So, without a purposeful plan, the same has happened to me as I train puppies. I want students to start them out with life experiences in preparation for later associative learning.
How does that apply to your puppy? Get them out into the real world, starting very young, most puppies are in deprived environments growing up, and that stunts their potential. You can’t spend money that isn’t in savings.
Plan accordingly.