I commented today (twice) on a blog written by Laurie Luck called the Smart Dog blog, on a post called “A surprising look at balanced dog training.” Many trainers become familiar with operant conditioning at some point in their training lives – and the shorthand for positive reinforcement (R+), negative reinforcement (R-), positive punishment (P+) [...]
People love rules. And dog trainers love routines. Can you remember those old obedience class homework handouts: practice 15 automatic sits, heel forward with three left turns and three right turns, practice two fasts and two slows, practice sit/stay for three minutes and down/stay for five minutes on lead with distractions. I can. Taped each [...]
Madison and I have been working on her play skills – every day, a couple encouraged and praised tosses and retrieves of her favorite toy, the ginormous Nylaknot left in the toybox by the gordon setters. I’m still focused on trying to reward the right behavior (and not commit CRAP training – constantly rewarding ‘almost’ [...]
Image by shutterflood via Flickr My name is Pat, and I train dogs for competition performance events. No, I’m not on the Agility World Team. I don’t make the list for the annual AKC Obedience invitational. I haven’t made the Front & Finish top dog in breed rankings since Casey was in Novice obedience and [...]
On Twitter, @wholedogcamp has been asking people to complete this 10-question Dog Owners survey: http://bit.ly/yyEko One note: if you’ve owned multiple dogs, you should complete a new survey for each individual dog. For me, that meant 8 surveys (Taryn, Jazz, Nola, Muni, Bard, Casey, Reuben and Madison) which took me about 15 minutes, total (~2 [...]
