#dog training

[riley-coyotl]

Happy visit with Juni and Kelpie. They both love getting up on the exam table! This was Juni's first happy visit with Kelpie (and without Maple) and she did great!

[iinkandiivy]

you reeallllyyy should’ve picked someone easier. someone soft and sweet and obedient. someone who listens the first time. but noooooo. you chose me. someone who talks back, and rolls his eyes, and makes you work for it. so now you have to deal with the consequences :P

and i know the rules. i know exactly what you expect from me but do i follow them? nope! i break them anyway; pushing all your buttons, seeing just how far i can test the limits until you snap. until you get that look in your eyes, the one that tells me i’ve finally gone too far. the way your patience frays, grip tightens, and voice drops when you tell me to “lose the attitude.”

[refugeed-kim]

YES YES I NEED THIS SIGN IN EVERY SINGLE PARK PLEASE

This is my daily struggle, I had so many arguments with people with off-leash dogs (in a mandatory leash area!!!). Thanks to this behavior I'm struggling with Kim being anxious/aggressive with other females as she often gets involved in unpleased interactions with free females while on leash. And every single time that I ask for the dog to be at least recalled, I'm being called names and insulted of course.

Also 9 out of 10 their dog isn't really that friendly at all.

[coffee-mage-sans-caffeine]

My wife's service dog in training, Matilda, is trained to be super annoying at specific times of day. This is because my wife's executive dysfunction does not allow her to 'unfreeze' and therefore she gets 'stuck' in places/doing things long after she needs to move on to another task, room, etc. This isn't some arbitrary 'you should only play video games so long' type of thing. It's 'If unattended, my wife will not eat or sleep because moving from one thing to another is very hard'. Eating and sleeping are necessary things for survival, so moving to these tasks is necessary for survival. Matilda has therefore been taught things like 'ten pm is bedtime'. In order to help Matilda with this, her feeding schedule is on a pretty tight timeline as well--this way her internal body cues are lined up with the schedule of the day. For example, Matilda is fed between 8 and 830 pm (usually at about 810 pm, as it works out). She poops at 830 pm after dinner and she will throw a WHOLE FIT if she is not let out at this time. Daylight Savings has Happened to Matilda. She's only just a year old, so she does not remember Daylight Savings last year (she was two weeks old, roughly) and she does not remember the spring time change, either, as she was a fairly young puppy at that time and therefore not trained to a schedule like this. She is BEREFT. We're making her wait an hour for dinner. We're making her wait an hour for bedtime. She knows she needs to go out at 830, but it is not time for her to poop yet, which is BAFFLING. This poor dog. I'm sure she'll adjust in a week or two, but poor Matilda. We need to outlaw Daylight Savings. For Matilda.

[stinkybrowndogs]

Dog training

[local-hellhound-steals-spaghetti]

Jfc so many TikTok dog trainers push this idea that giving your dog attention when they ask for it, getting excited when you come home and letting your dog sleep in you bed causes separation anxiety.

It doesn’t. Research has shown that separation anxiety are caused by factors like genetics, trauma, sudden environmental changes, moving house and other usually completely out of control factors.

Your dog is a goddamn social animal. Social sleeping is natural behaviour, big excited greetings is natural behaviour and seeking social support and interaction is NATURAL BEHAVIOUR. Because you have brought a social living breathing animal into your house and you are their social group.

Withholding attention and being unpredictable or conditional about interacting with a social animal makes you kind of an asshole. Sure, you should set boundaries and your dog doesn’t have to live in your skin either, but don’t let unqualified so-called “professionals” shame you for loving your dog how you choose to love them.

Let them sleep in your bed if you want them to, revel in the joy of an excited dog greeting you when you come home, give your dog pats and cuddles when they seek you for them.

And don’t let anyone tell you that giving social support to a social animal is going to cause them anxiety. Because that is not how anxiety works at all.

(I have a Bachelor degree in Canine Science and am a Certified Professional Dog Trainer)

[orcinus-veterinarius]

Learning anything about marine mammal training will make you re-evaluate so much of your relationship with your own pets. There is so much force involved in the way we handle domestic animals. Most of it isn’t even intentional, it just stems from impatience. I’m guilty of it myself!

But with the exception of certain veterinary settings where the animal’s health is the immediate priority, why is it so important to us that animals do exactly what we want exactly when we want it? Why do we have to invent all these tools and contraptions to force them to behave?

When a whale swam away from a session, that was that. The trainer just waited for them to decide to come back. If they flat out refused to participate in behaviors, they still got their allotment of fish. Nothing bad happened. Not even when 20-30 people were assembled for a procedure, and the whale chose not to enter the medical pool. No big deal. Their choice and comfort were prioritized over human convenience.

It’s almost shocking to return to domestic animal medicine afterwards and watch owners use shock collars and chokers and whips to control their animals. It’s no wonder that positive reinforcement was pioneered by marine mammal trainers. When you literally can’t force an animal to do what you want, it changes your entire perspective.

I want to see that mindset extended to our domestic animals.

[elvenferretots]

I don't think the idea of what retirement should be is talked about enough in dog sport spaces.

People "retire" dogs from sports all the time. The dog gets too old to safely play, acquires an injury that makes the sport unsafe or uncomfortable, or has a behavioral or temperament issue that makes the sport unenjoyable. I don't think anyone can argue that it's unethical to keep pushing a dog in a sport to their detriment.

But what I see from there, I can argue with. So many people get high drive working dogs and do... nothing with them when they retire. They often refer to them as a "couch ornament". They leave them home on sport weekends. They use the lack of finances or time to do an extra sport as the excuse to stop coaching and building new repertoires with the dog.

We spend so much time arguing these dogs NEED jobs, then do nothing with them for months to years at the end of their working life. Retirement (for humans as well as dogs-- but that's a whole new can of worms) should not mean doing nothing. Living beings aren't meant to stop learning and growing and doing. Puppies are less capable, but we don't do nothing with them until six months anymore. We meet them where they're at. It's so important for physical wellness and neural plasticity that we do the same with our retired dogs.

I have a dog whose health meant he would be retired in any serious competitive context. Biting a sleeve or suit is too high injury risk. He can't jump his full obedience height or to catch a disc. He will never get the AKC RACH or OTCH I had him slated for. But he still plays! He comes with to mondio club and is preparing to trial in obedience with no jumps. He trials in AKC preferred obedience and got his rally choice title, the highest level without jumps, last fall. We're going to compete for our UKC RACH this trial season, since they don't require jumps for rally and let you jump minimum height. He still competes in every disc dog competition my competitive dog does, and even surprised me by placing in the last two despite only catching rollers. We started shed hunt and a Nosework class even though I currently don't have the funds or time to compete in more sports.

The biggest difference I've noticed in him since competing with him and taking him to classes again? He's so so much more behaviorally sound. He's happier. He's fulfilled. And he's physically more sound on top of that, because he's using his body in healthy ways and is not so pent up that he's injuring himself with normal movement.

Retirement should mean a new phase in life, not life being over. Rest and stagnancy are not the same. Quite honestly, if my retired working dog isn't ready to learn a new activity or play a new game, it's time to have a serious talk with my vet about quality of life.

[3liza]

concept I'm rotating in my mind palace: for an autistic person dog ownership and specifically social acceptability training of the dog can be a way of literally externalizing and literally embodying in the Other all the frustration and trauma of not knowing how to behave in social settings as a human. the dog's range of behaviors and expectations is much narrower and easier to systematize. the ease and facility with which the animal-empath/Beastmaster autism subtype (the "Temple Grandin Autists") trains and cares for a dog and creates a socially-acceptable creature is immensely therapeutic to the social shame injury of childhood rejection, while simultaneously acting as a social and physical shield from the judgment of other humans: if there is a dog in the room everyone is looking at the dog and not you, and judging you by the dog's behavior, not your own. this is localized to North America I think and probably mostly for white people, Americans really have a weird and unhealthy relationship to pet dogs but autistic people can really benefit from leveraging it

[connorskeepers]

Please if anyone could donate or even reblog if you can’t , Morgan is my Seizure and cluster headache alert dog and she tore her CCL and I could use all the help I can get as I’m limited income (though I’m trying to make full time working happen through social security programs)

[abirddogmoment]

It drives me crazy how people will label independent thinking dogs as slow or stubborn. It's a different flavour of intelligence, not less.

[fayeandknight]

As a dog trainer I don't think there's a greater moment than when I help show someone how awesome their dog can be.

This mostly comes from agility training as that's one of my specialties. But I just adore those moments when the person asks their dog to do a thing and the dog goes all in. Especially in the beginning - the person is stunned and proud and giddy. I sing their praises and remind them that this is made possible by all the work they've done to create a good relationship between them and their dog.

I love watching people fall in love/be impressed with their dog.

[sheepdogsandsidesaddle]

Now, I'm not saying that McCaig is THE BE-ALL END-ALL EXPERT on this topic nor am I looking to start a bunch of discussion regarding breed splits...

Please share for better sample size. This is for a personal project.

[local-hellhound-steals-spaghetti]

Genuinely would love to meet the "purely positive" dog trainers that aversive/balanced trainers keep talking about. You know, the ones that are so against using force that they just let their dogs walk into traffic.

Boy, they sure must lose a lot of dogs every year and honestly I'm amazed they're still alive themselves if they're getting dragged in front of a semi trailer every time they go out for a walk...

[dexter-boi]

Poindexter Aloysius Gogo (Dexter)