Raising Your Puppy with Michael Ellis
Regardless of your ultimate training goals, everything must start with how we raise our puppies. How do we interact with them at a young age while they learn what is appropriate behavior? How do we teach our young dogs how to live in our home? How do we develop the drives needed to train in specific disciplines? In this DVD, world-renowned dog trainer, Michael Ellis, will teach you exactly how he does just that.
The DVD starts off with how to select and pick your next puppy. From there, we will dive straight into bringing your puppy home, management, and socialization. Michael covers everything including how to set up your home, how to prepare your puppy for veterinary visits, and how to successfully live with a working dog in your home. A common misconception in the dog training world is that working dogs cannot live in your home and still perform at the highest level. Michael will dispel that myth with personal experience and examples. You will also learn how to introduce the home to your dog and separate it from the rest of their formal training regimen.
Management and Socialization are probably the two most important aspects of puppy development. By implementing good management techniques, you will create a dog that understands what rules and expectations are expected to be followed. The socialization methods taught in this DVD are going to teach you how to develop a dog who is confident and able to work in any environment under distractions.
By understanding and identifying early developmental periods, you are going to be able to set your puppy up for success by preventing unwanted behavioral issues. This is all done by implementing proper management and socialization routines. However, first you must understand what to look for at specific times within your puppy’s critical developmental periods.
You will learn to begin using engagement techniques with your puppy at a very young age. This is going to allow you to develop an adult dog that wants to be with you and wants what you have. During our engagement work, we will begin the first step in our recall training process. This step is the restrained recall. This simple training exercise has countless benefits to our relationship with our dog and the quality of our formal recall later down the road. By the end of the DVD, Michael will also teach you the next several steps toward training a solid recall command.
In the second half of the DVD, Michael will cover how to begin training behaviors and develop necessary drives. Using operant and classical conditioning, you will learn the basic learning theory behind Michael’s entire training methodology. From there, you will learn how to apply that theory into a marker training system. Michael will teach how to shape 2 basic behaviors using luring. This work will transfer straight into Michael’s core DVD, The Power of Training dogs with Food.
Developing play drive is an import part of our puppy’s development. When developed properly as a puppy, utilizing play as a reward with our adult dogs has huge benefits to the quality of our training. Not only our ability to use it as high value rewards, but also our ability to keep our dog’s attention through extremely difficult distractions. The play chapter in this DVD is extensive. You will learn food play techniques, toy play techniques, and restrained play techniques. You are also going to learn how each of these techniques play on each other to create a finished product of an adult dog who not only loves to play as a reward, but also understands the rules of play and how to play with their handler. You will learn how to transfer food games into tugging games, how to back chain retrieving behavior from tugging behavior, and how to use restraint to build drive and muscle memory.
Our original goal for Michael Ellis’ puppy DVD was to create a shorter, 2-3 hour DVD on simple management techniques. However, once the project got underway, we quickly realized there was far too much that we wanted to cover. We ended up with a 2-disk set containing just shy of 7 hours of training material. This DVD is going to give you the training skills you need to develop your puppy into an active training partner.
DVD Chapters:
- How to Pick a Puppy
- Bringing the Puppy Home
- Management
- Socialization
- Critical Developmental Periods
- Handling Skills
- Redirection
- Learning Theory
- Engagement & Restrained Recalls
- Luring
- Behavior Creation
- Play
- Environmental Conditioning
- Recall Progression
- Aversives with Puppies
- Where to go from Here
Comments
I very much appreciate that Michael Ellis actually demonstrates the exercises himself. And then the video shows other students doing it. You get to see some common mistakes and how to fix them. I wish there was more of an emphasis on "common mistakes" (because doing something wrong is easy when you're new at it). But this wasn't bad. In several clips, a young puppy will ignore then handler and just run off. This was both comical and beneficial because it sets the right expectations of how puppies behave.
My only gripe about this video (and the reason I didn't give it 5 stars) is that the title of the video is "Raising Your Puppy with Michael Ellis". This video is very focused on the engagement and training aspect. And it does a wonderful job at that. But there is almost no content on management. Very basic skills that one would need to "Raise their Puppy" is missing, ie how to give a bath, when to feed, right right way to feed, going for walks, ferberizing, introducing to different everyday environments, hazards, riding in cars, going for walks .. etc. Little or none of those things are covered, which I believe are important information one would have expected from the title.
This EXCELLENT video would have been better titled "Developing Engagement and Relationship with your Puppy"; because that's that you'll actually be learning. And if that's your interest, then this video will be a happy edition to your dog training library.
Great job Michael Ellis!
However, this dvd is more about concepts of dog training, and there is not really any info in here on specific behaviors that you might be interested to learn as a new dog owner.
Another thing this dvd does not lay at all is a timeline for what you can expect to ask of you dog as you go along.. I know that this is not possible for all dogs as a single timeline would never work.. However, I believe some general guidelines would be really helpful.
Finally, my last critique on this dvd is that it does not address aversive actions to the dogs.. I watched this dvd before i got my puppy about a year ago.. No that I have a highly motivate rockin' 1 year old dog, I wish I had some some thing differently than what this dvd suggests.
I have learned now that I cannot allow behaviors to be exhibited by my dog that I do not want to see.. This is made clear in the DVD. However, Michael suggest 'redirections' and increased distance to build the dogs focus on you in order to eliminate the behaviors that you don't to see..
In my humble uneducated opinion, I believe that if you have a very very very high drive and strong willed dog, you must immediately correct all unwanted behaviors starting at a very young age.. IMO, this dvd does a poor job of addressing corrections for people that have dogs like I do.
Basic enough for any beginner
Well done Michael
Michael Ellis is great explaining not only why we should do what we do but also what benefits this will bring us later.
There is a great mix of theory, examples and detailed demonstrations.
I knew of the marker system in advance, yet got a couple of epiphanies during this Video.
This is the best training concept I have come across and this video is a fantastic starting point for a working puppy.
Thank you, Michael!
I wish I was in the States to attend your school, yet thanks to Leerburg at least it is possible to learn across the Atlantic.
I look forward to many more of Michaels videos.
Very happy with the purchase!
Also, the care that he shows for the puppies as he develops their play drive shows that you can humanely develop your puppy to a high degree, without harsh treatment.
I'm only part way into it, and loving every step. They are helpful, and 'step by step' so those of us, not in the competitive sport, can follow it. Thank you Michael and Leerburg. I'm hoping to compete ...in some venue, at some point. Probably only in the Ob aspect..but who knows?!