Timing, criteria, rate of reinforcement. We all know that these three make or break our dog training, and that improvement in any one of those areas will vastly improve our overall training success.
Let’s look at timing today and talk about why it is so crucially important to make sure your timing is on point.

At first we need to take a step back and look at the way that dogs experience the world.
Many occurrences in our dogs’ lives are in no way related to their own actions. We feed them every day regardless of whether or not they do anything for it. We walk them every day without them having to initiate it. We take them on car rides, to the vet and to the dog park. But it is not just we who add random events to their lives – sometimes their dog friends come over, sometimes it snows, sometimes they find a dead bird in the yard.

I think it is safe to say that our dogs have no understanding of why these things happen. They live in a world of constant random events. Every day is a surprise, and while they understand routines and start to expect certain happenings (such as being fed at the same time every day), most of their lives is – from their point of view – pretty unpredictable and arbitrary.

We as humans have a concept of how events are related to our actions, or if they are not we understand what caused them (such as weather). It is important to keep in mind that again, dogs don’t have an intellectual understanding of why things happen.