Let’s talk about how to get started with training your dog. I’ll cover how to tackle training with an older dog, and look at first steps for a new puppy.
This is about the practical side of things. Exactly how you get a dog to obey a specific command or cue. What you should teach first. And what to do in your very first training session together.
Old dogs and young dogs
Most dog parents, especially with older dogs, are worried that their dog doesn’t listen, And they are right to worry about this.
With a puppy you have an advantage. Most people don’t feel out of control with a nine week old puppy. Tired yes, a little overwhelmed yes, but the chances are, their little one is not running away at the dog park, knocking over visiting children or picking fights with other dogs. And with a puppy you don’t feel so ‘under pressure’ to have a well-behaved dog.
I’ll talk a bit more about puppies later. Either way, the best time to start training any dog, is right now. So let’s start by looking at the rules of the game that apply to all dogs, old and young. They are simple.
The rules of the game
Whether you are training a puppy or older dog there are similar principles involved.
#1 First we need to get the dog’s attention.
#2 Then we need to show the dog how to work with us to earn rewards.
These two things are critical, as a dog that isn’t listening, isn’t learning. And a dog that doesn’t know what you want, is just going to get frustrated or bored with the whole training business.
You can teach your dog these rules at the same time as you train a skill such as sit or down. But it’s helpful if they understand these rules in advance. And I’ll talk about that in a moment.
Let’s look at how to pick the very first skill you should tackle when you start regular training sessions with your dog.
What do you teach your dog first?
With an older dog, the priorities are usually control issues. Among other things, people want a reliable recall and a dog that gets in their basket or crate when they are told.
I think a great place to start with an adult dog that has some understanding of what humans want but often chooses to ignore them, is ‘place’ or ‘station’ training. This is where you teach a dog to jump into a dog basket or onto a mat and stay there until released.
It’s a good skill to start with because a lot of the training can be done indoors. And indoors is a great place to teach your dog that you are worth listening to. It’s also a good way to show your dog how to win some great rewards by working as a team with you as you play some fun training games together.
The Foundations Skills course is a good way to start ‘station training’ and it also includes the focus and attention training that we talked about earlier.
But you don’t need a course to teach these skills, you just need to understand how we get from a dog that doesn’t listen at all, to a dog that listens very well. I’ll talk about that next.
How to get a dog to obey you
Let’s say you want to teach a dog to get on a mat or in their basket when you give the cue ‘go to bed’
I think it will be helpful to start at the end result, and work backwards. We need to understand what has happened in the past, when we see a dog (let’s call him ‘Jim’) that quickly and enthusiastically jumps onto their bed each time their owner says ‘go to bed’
Jim will have what we call a great reinforcement history. That means he has built up a habit of obeying the ‘go to bed’ cue repeatedly in all kinds of different situations. And it means that this has been a sufficiently reinforcing experience in the past, for him to want to continue giving these great responses, in the future.
That doesn’t mean a dog has to always be rewarded, or that you have to have always have rewards on you. It’s nice if you reward your dog, but the idea is that the dog’s response has been rewarded so effectively, that it has become a deeply ingrained habit. That’s what gets that quick response.
Jim isn’t hearing ‘go to bed’ and mulling it over. He isn’t thinking ‘what’s in it for me’ he just responds automatically.
Even if Jim’s owner drops their supper on the floor, or the delivery guy hammers on the door, or the neighbors pop around for a chat, when they say ‘go to bed’ that’s what Jim does. And that’s where you want to be with your dog.
So how do we get to that point? How do dogs learn to obey while ignoring distractions?
How dogs learn to listen during distractions
Jim wasn’t always able to respond to the ‘go to bed’ cue when the neighbors came round, or when food was spilled. Just as he wasn’t always able come when called at the dog park among other dogs.
These are distractions that Jim has learned to ignore. And his owners got to that point by adding those distractions in very gradually. And by practising a lot.
Perhaps they sent Jim into his bed and then calmly placed food on the floor, waited a few seconds, and then picked that food up and gave it to Jim as a reward for sitting patiently in his bed while they did this.
They probably started with the food quite far away. And they may have introduced other distractions gradually too. Rattling Jim’s dinner bowl for example. Over time, Jim learned that staying in his bed after hearing the ‘go to bed cue’ is much more rewarding than getting out of the bed before he is given permission to do so.
This process of adding distractions to a known cue, is called proofing. And missing it out is the number one reason why so many dogs fail to listen to their human friends.
But before we get to the point where we can ‘proof’ a cue against distractions we need to teach our dogs to obey that cue when there are no distractions. For the dog to obey a cue reliably, they need to understand what it means and practice responding to it repeatedly.
How dogs learn to understand different cues
This is one of the areas where dog training has changed dramatically over the last few decades.
It’s tempting to give the cue: ‘go to bed’, then push or pull the dog onto the dog bed and give them a treat. Sounds sensible right?
This is how virtually everyone trained dogs when I started dog training in the 1970s. Only the dog didn’t get a treat. Just a pat on the head and some praise.
And this is also where people are confusing the two methods, the old and the new. They try to use food together with traditional methods, then come to the conclusion that training with food doesn’t work. The dog just learns that the ‘bed’ is not a nice place to be, and that the people around him are grumpy and illogical.
In modern training we don’t give any cues at all, not a single one. At least not until the dog is jumping on and off the bed enthusiastically and predictably in a distraction free training context, and being generously reinforced for doing so.
Then when we do add the cue: ‘go to bed’ we do so just before the dog jumps on the bed, so that the dog keeps hearing the cue being ‘paired’ with response. Just as you might learn a foreign language by sitting in a chair and just as you sit down, having a friendly person tell you what we call that behavior in French or Spanish, or whatever language you are learning.
“But, but Pippa!” you say “how am I supposed to get my dog jumping into their bed, if I’m not allowed to say ‘go to bed’ and I’m not allowed to take the dog onto their bed!” Let’s look at that next.
How to get a dog to behave without cues or force
To get a dog to repeatedly offer a behavior that we intend to put on cue, without force or even speaking to the dog, we can use one of several different methods.
- Capturing
- Shaping
- Luring
Capturing
Capturing is the simplest and most problem free method to get a dog to offer the same behavior over and over again. And it’s easy to do this with behaviors that dogs offer repeatedly and naturally in the course of a normal day. Sit is a great example.
All you need to do is give a marker each time the dog sits (you can use a word like YES, or a click from a clicker) Then throw a treat out of reach so that the dog has to get up to collect it. This resets the dog for another sit, and another, and another. So that in the space of a couple of minutes you could capture 10 or 20 sits and reward them.
After a couple of sessions, your dog will be offering you sits predictably and you can then introduce the sit cue each time the dog returns after collecting their treat. This is a great way for your dog to learn our language and discover what sit means while having fun. But capturing is not suitable for everything you teach your dog.
With ‘go to bed’ capturing could take a while. You’d need to watch your dog and say YES (or click) each time they went on their bed, then throw a treat away from the bed to reset them for another try. But it could be hours before your dog gets on their bed. They might prefer to sleep on the floor today. So instead we can use shaping or luring
Shaping
Shaping is capturing on steroids! To shape a new behavior you capture the nearest thing to it, that your dog is currently doing quite frequently. So with ‘go to bed’ we could capture the dog walking past their bed.
When the dog has figured out that walking past their bed earns a treat, and is doing that repeatedly, you stop the rewards. The dog will then offer different behaviors to try to make the rewards start happening again. The dog might bark for example. You’d just ignore this.
Or they might poke the bed with a nose or a paw. That’s worth rewarding because its nearer to the final behavior we want, then just walking past the bed.
Once the dog is repeatedly touching the bed for their treat (you throw this away from the bed to reset them) you stop the rewards again and wait for a better behavior.
By moving the goalposts in this way, we build behaviors that are closer and closer to our final goals.
While shaping is a perfectly good way to get a dog onto their bed, and great practice if you are new to positive reinforcement training. It’s not the method of my choice.
Luring
I use luring to get the jumping on the bed behavior started. It’s very quick but there can be problems with luring and you need to be aware of them.
If you lure too often, the dog will struggle to understand how to offer the behavior when the lure isn’t there.
So with luring I aim to lose the lure by the end of the first or second session. And this is how I get started with the ‘go to bed’ command in the very first training session.
How to teach your dog to go to bed
You need to get yourself comfortable on the floor next to your dog’s bed. So you might want to grab a pillow or a mat if you are on a hard tile floor like mine.
You also need to arm yourself with some decent treats. You can read more about choosing the right treats in my article on getting started with training with food.
Day 1
Start by placing a treat in the bed, wait for the dog to eat it, and place another one there. Repeat 5-10 times and take a break.
Then repeat again after an hour or two. And again later in the day. Feed in the bed 5 or 6 times during the day if you can. What you are doing is building value for the bed, and making it a fun place to be. And also making the dog aware that if you are sitting next to their bed, its probably worth jumping into it.
Day 2
The next day, start again. This time your goal is to get the dog into the bed. Place the treat so that the dog has to step into the bed to get it. If the dog doesn’t step in the bed you can hold a treat in front of their nose just out of reach and lure them into the bed that way.
As soon as the dog has at least two paws in the bed say YES and feed them several more treats. Then throw a treat away from the bed and wait for the dog to come back for another go.
Repeat a couple of times then try to get all four paws in the bed using the same method. Luring the dog in a circle on the bed usually gets the rear paws to join the front ones. But you need to lose that lure now. So be patient, have some great treats, and give the dog plenty of opportunity to get in the bed
The next stage is to sit by the bed with your treats and do nothing. You are waiting to see if the dog gets in the bed or at least puts a paw in the bed, without the lure. Again, you’ll mark the dog with YES for stepping in the bed, feed the dog several times in the bed, then throw a treat away from the dog to ‘reset’ them.
Day 3
Once the dog is jumping into the bed when you sit down next to it, you can gradually reduce the number of treats fed in the bed, until the dog is jumping on the bed, hearing your marker YES and jumping off the bed to collect their treat each time.
Next you’ll add simple distractions such as you standing up, then moving further from the bed. And then you can add some duration. Treat streaming works well for this, give several treats before you give your marker YES. Then gradually increase the gaps between those treats so that the dog is staying in the bed for longer.
What about puppies
I said earlier that I’d talk a bit more about puppies. Dogs can start ‘go to bed’ training at a very young age, but I usually wait until they are three or four months old. That’s because there are so many great games that you can play with pups that help build their confidence and develop their bond with you. Staying in a bed at 9 weeks old really isn’t a priority.
Games like ‘Mother Hen’, and ‘Sweet Goodbyes’ are ideal for new puppies and you can find these and many more in our Puppy Games course
What could go wrong?
If at any time the dog leaves the bed before your mark (YES), then they receive nothing. Just wait for the dog to get back in the bed again.
If the dog gets bored of the game and wanders off you are either using boring treats, or the dog is not hungry. Remember, all dogs need to eat, use treats that are valuable to your dog and don’t train immediately after they have just eaten a big meal.
If you add distractions into early stage training your dog will fail. So shut out the cat and wait until the kids are in bed or at school.
What you need to learn in order to be successful
In dog training, it isn’t just the dog that is learning. You need to learn too. And this is one of the reasons that many people find dog training so challenging. They start trying to train their dog without any real understanding of how to break training into achievable steps, or how to get their dog’s attention.
Many pet parents start by trying a pick and mix approach to training, and often use traditional training methods to achieve their goals. They know that food rewards are important and they do include food rewards in their sessions. But mixing food with traditional training techniques is not going to help you and your dog make good progress. Training with food is only effective if the trainer has the knowledge required to use it effectively
You’ll find you get better and better at it with practice. Read everything you can about positive reinforcement training, and practice as often as you can. Early steps in training involve many repetitions in a short space of time, so make sure your treats are tiny and your dog is hungry.
If you have not already signed up for my Training Tips newsletter please do! It’s free and there are lots of tips and ideas there. If you prefer to learn through videos, you can buy an All Access Pass to all my courses. We often send out discount codes through that list.
Whether you decide to train your dog by yourself or join a class or a course, good luck! And don’t forget, the best time to start, is right now!
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