January 13, 2014
My dog excels in his formal training classroom environment but becomes anxious or excited in the park. Can you suggest one of your training modules that will assist me with his training?
Full Question:
Good morning,I have an 8 month old Doberman pincher who excels in his formal training classroom environment but becomes anxious or excited in the park. He seems to loose all cognitive thought when he sees a runner, another dog, or a person walking near or past us. In the classroom the behavior is just the opposite. Can you suggest one of your training modules that will assist me with his training?
Thank you.
Ed's Answer:
This is a very, very common problem. Bottom line is your dog has not GENERALIZED the behaviors you're training in the classroom setting.
Generalization should be an important part of every training program. It simply means that our dogs learn to offer behaviors (sit – down – come) in every location and under every distraction. New trainers see this all the time. They get their dog to SIT in the kitchen but it won’t SIT in the backyard or down the street or at the park.
The first thing we teach our dogs is to engage with us. In fact that’s the only thing we work on for the first 7 or 8 months. Engagement simply means our dog is 100% focused on us and wants what we have – and what we have is either a high value food reward or a high value toy.
This foundation for this work is covered in these videos:
The Power of Training Dogs with Food
The Power of Playing Tug with Your Dog
Do the food work first.
Go to the video-on-demand section of our web site and put ENGAGEMENT into the search box. We have over 700 free videos and a number of them demonstrate what engagement looks like.
Engagement can and should be put on CUE.
I hope this helps.
Regards,
Ed Frawley
Generalization should be an important part of every training program. It simply means that our dogs learn to offer behaviors (sit – down – come) in every location and under every distraction. New trainers see this all the time. They get their dog to SIT in the kitchen but it won’t SIT in the backyard or down the street or at the park.
The first thing we teach our dogs is to engage with us. In fact that’s the only thing we work on for the first 7 or 8 months. Engagement simply means our dog is 100% focused on us and wants what we have – and what we have is either a high value food reward or a high value toy.
This foundation for this work is covered in these videos:
The Power of Training Dogs with Food
The Power of Playing Tug with Your Dog
Do the food work first.
Go to the video-on-demand section of our web site and put ENGAGEMENT into the search box. We have over 700 free videos and a number of them demonstrate what engagement looks like.
Engagement can and should be put on CUE.
I hope this helps.
Regards,
Ed Frawley
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