Blog

Do You Train What Your Dog Needs?

Training Philosophy

Do You Train What Your Dog Needs?

Do you train what you want or what your dog needs

A weakness we are all guilty of is training the things that are already going well. We may have a very motivated, driven dog who is great at playing with toys, great at dynamic tricks, great at recalls. Naturally these are the behaviors that are the most fun to work on. So we keep working on them and our dog gets better and better at them. He may struggle with behaviors that require being more calm and collected: perhaps a sit stay or waiting his turn while you train your other dog are really hard for this dog. You may just choose to not work on those behaviors as it is less fun, less rewarding and harder.

On the other hand, maybe you have a quite soft, calm dog who is a bit harder to motivate. You may choose to work on sit stays and static tricks instead of searching for new ways to play with him or making him a bit more spunky. It is easy to work with what we got – and a lot harder to push for changes!

Training is Rewarding for the Trainer

At the end of the day, the vast majority of the time we train our dogs because it is rewarding to us as trainers. Very rarely do I need to train my dogs because otherwise they are problematic. I train because I enjoy it, it is fun and of course it is as rewarding to me as it is to the dog.
We as humans are trained to look for instant gratification in dog training – the quicker our dog gets what we want, the faster and more precise he carries out our goal behavior the happier and more accomplished we feel.

Now of course this gratification is easier to find if we train behaviors that come naturally to our dogs. We tend to build on their strengths over and over, making them super strengths – and at the same time not work at the areas that they are weak at, since it is not as fun for us. Another factor comes into play that I willingly admit has at times kept me from working on my dogs’ weaknesses: it is a lot harder to think of solutions for behaviors that are hard for our dogs. We need to think outside the box, and we need to be able to accept our own defeat and failure and still continue to search for new ideas.

If I am training something my dog is already good at, I don’t need to invent a lot of new approaches. If he is a wild little thing and can weave through my legs and jump over my arms, he can probably also learn to spin and to jump over my legs. It may be a totally different story to teach him to sit still while another dog is spinning and jumping!

My dog Kix is a 3 year old Border Collie and the poster child of a wild dog. She is driven, fast, loud and always up for a lot of fun. She loves agility and tricks and she has no problems to go go go. The one thing she is pretty bad at is patience. So, more than half of her daily training time is dedicated to being patient. She lies down and waits her turn while my other two dogs train. I have her stay and wait while the others play with toys with me. She does a lot of tricks that challenge her body awareness and are only doable with a lot of calmness and focus. Going fast and furious will get her nowhere.

Of course she still gets to let the crazies out every day, but we never only go crazy. We go crazy, and then we focus and collect.
Here are some of the games we play:

(Interested in more games? Check out Brain Games Online Class)

With these practices I have a dog who can use her brain even when very excited. At first this whole patience training was not inherently fun, I would have much rather just played wildly with her (as you may be able to tell, I definitely have the same strengths and weaknesses as her). But the end result – a dog who has both self control and sky-high motivation – was well worth investing the time to increase her patience.

When you start to work on your dog’s weaknesses, it will probably not be as much fun as working on their strengths. Don’t be discouraged and seek the immediate gratification of training the things he is already good at. Once you go through the less fun process of building up their weaknesses, you will be much happier with the end result. You will have a dog who doesn’t really have “weaknesses” and “strengths” anymore, but only strengths! While they will always tend to be a little bit better at one area of training than another, a balanced dog who is able to do it all is the most fun to train.

(There is one exception to this. If I am working with an anxious or fearful dog, I will always start with their strengths and keep working with those until the dog is brimming with self confidence and behaving very self-assured in training. I want every dog to feel like a super star when we train, and for fearful dogs it is especially important we never give them the sensation of failure. We want them to learn that training is a wonderful game at which they always, always win. This is the easiest if we only use their strengths at first.)

How are you balancing your dog’s strengths and weaknesses?

Happy Training!