I have a 1 year old Malinois. I want to make him neutral to other dogs and I wanted your advice on how to do this.

I’ll give you the short answer, marker training.

Instead of thinking about giving him corrections to make him not wanting to play with other dogs, how about thinking of ways you can become more interesting to him? Think about what you can do to make him WANT to play with you and pay attention to you over anything else that may be going on. His behavior is telling you that other dogs are more fun that you are. This is where you need to think about what you can do to make him want to stick around. What does he like the most? Use it to your advantage.

The foundation to this whole concept is in this article and video, The Power of Training Dogs with Markers.

You can see a short trailer of the video on the link above.

If you’ve watched any of our online videos or in the newsletter, you have probably seen my young Malinois show very good focus on me even when there are cats running around. Cats are REALLY interesting but I am more so because of the relationship and games I play with my dog. He knows that I’m consistently more fun and that if he pays attention to me, great things come his way. With a 1 year old dog, I’d be focusing on this and not on ecollar corrections.

I use the ecollar too, but not in the way you are using it with such a young dog. I can always add corrections later, when I’m sure that I’ve done my foundation properly and then only if he chooses to not listen to me. With the marker training, I’ve found that I rarely use the collar and usually only for emergency situations like a deer popping out of the grass when we are walking or something like that. Other dogs are not reinforcing to my dogs, so they tend to pay little attention to them.

Cindy