Attitude vs Mechanics

In the course of teaching a lot of different types of dog training course; whether for sport or work, I find myself making the same observations. A big one is that trainers of all types get way to hung up on the mechanics of a task. Take police k9 detection tasks; something that I am teaching at the moment. I could take a clicker and a handful of treats and teach a great many dogs to nose touch an odor and then sit. However I need a dog that will do all of the above in the presence of a massive amount of distraction, when he is tired, when his handler is distracted, when it is in a place where it has never been in training. For that I need a dog that not only understands the correct exercise but also has the right attitude. In the course of my travels lately I have seen a lot of examples of where the trainer or handler was "winning the battle" and getting a certain behavior but "losing the war" by detracting from the dogs enthusiasm or understanding.

Two more weeks of detection training in the Washington DC area. We have worked with a large group of really fun, highly motivated police k9 trainers. Dogs have been excellent too.

A New Training Project

As if traveling the country helping to teach detection trainer's course and training my own four dogs; including a 6 month old puppy, wasn't enough - I have added a new training project. I was asked to join Denise Fenzi's new project, an online dog sports academy.

www.fenzidogsportsacademy.com

I am going to offering a variety of on line tracking classes. At first I had some misgivings about teaching tracking in such a format. It is challenging enough as it is. However I gave it some thought and I m looking forward to tackling the challenge. I put together my list of courses last night and it was a challenge to break the skills down into individual courses. I generally try to teach my green/young dogs some of the more advanced skills right from the start. I am careful not to over challenge them but I also want to take advantage of the fact that they don't know that something is an advanced skill yet. They are too new to the task to make assumptions - such as "tracks are always on grass". I will try to do a little of that in the classes but most likely less than I do with my own dogs.

Six month old malinois learning that he can track on asphalt as well as grass. It isn't pretty yet but I accomplished my training goals of showing him that tracking is tracking; it has nothing to do with what surface the track is on. You can see at first that he thinks this is an attention exercise. As he gains experience the harness will help him determine the difference. I laid the track in my sock feet so as to help him have some extra scent to follow (don't laugh; I laid a big chunk of Steel's VST tracks in my sock feet). I didn't want to lay food on the track but I also wanted to reinforce the track a bit so you can see me tossing food out in front of us. My only goal at this point was to reinforce a behavior of him sticking his nose to the track. He cant help but smell the track while he is getting reinforced. I have a few additional techniques to develop his hard surface tracking but this worked okay for the first time.