Dog Training Tips, Tricks & Insights
I frequently say that finding positive reinforcement based dog training has changed my life. It did. But that doesn’t sum up how hugely it has impacted my life, who I am, and the life my dog now gets to live.
When you use positive reinforcement, you are addressing the emotional state of your dog.
This is not the same as “obedience.” This is not simply teaching your dog to sit in the presence of the scary thing. This is helping your dog to feel safe and confident around the scary thing by turning it into an actually-good-not-so-scary thing. So how can we go about this?
An aversive training tool is one that is designed to cause discomfort or pain in order to change an animal’s behavior. This includes prong collars, e-collars, and choke chains. Of course, flat collars and martingale collars can become aversive to our dogs if we use them to do things like pop the leash or force the dog into a down position by stepping on the leash.
Aversive tools and coercive methods do work to train your dog to do things like not bark, not pull, etc. But they also carry great risk to the welfare and overall behavior of our dogs. I know this because a) I have done extensive research on the topic and b) I have witnessed the fallout from these tools firsthand.
I want to talk about the name of my business for a minute. I chose it because it’s a little cheeky, and I love alliteration. Plus, according to many people, JJ’s actions would certainly fall under the “misbehaving” category. Like that one time she stole my Bojangle’s biscuit off the dining table while I was in the bathroom. And that time she stole cornbread off the counter while I was taking the trash out. (There’s a theme. It’s butter. She loves butter.) Or, we could talk about how she barks at the doorbell and lunges on leash.
But to JJ, this behavior isn’t bad behavior. It’s all functional – to her, the behavior serves a purpose. In many cases, the purpose of the behavior is simply to access a reinforcer.
Before even we adopted JJ, I read a training book that instructed on how to teach your puppy obedience without using food. I don’t remember what the writer’s justification for not using food was, but I do remember that after reading it, I felt like using food in training was the training equivalent of selling out. I was one of those “I want my dog to listen because she’s my dog, not because I have food” folks. Hey, we all start somewhere.
Now, I use food to train JJ every day. Why?
The short answer is that I use food because it works, but there’s more to it than that.