Transcripts For “Hands Off Dog Training”

Intro To Special Dog Training Techniques Hello and welcome to all you dog lovers out there. My name is Chet Womach and I am Dave Womach and we are the owners of playfulpupus.com and today we are going to be talking to you about how to use the phenomenal training tool, which is a clicker to totally transform yours’ dogs’ behaviors. We found through our web site birdtricks.com and throughout our training with parrots and I guess that is kind of where our background came from and throughout the course of about six months of producing these tapes we found out that the most powerful tool in any animal training is a clicker, much stronger than any other device out in the market and it has got one of the most simple, effective, and most inexpensive ways to train any animal. Exactly like Dave said there are so many things we have done. We have our background came originally in parrot training where we developed all sorts of training materials with mostly using clickers to totally shaped behaviors in birds and we just want to let you know that these principles will work in birds, they work on cats, they work on dolphins, they work on whatever. They are the basic principles that animal trainers all over the world use and that’s why we want to come out each day taking those clicker training principles, which have a whole lot of benefits that we’ll get into but specifically applying them towards your dog. The greatest thing about clicker training and the most unique aspect that it has over any other form is that its focusing on all the benefits and all the positive sides of training, your strictly rewarding behaviors that are good. You don’t reward any behaviors that are bad. You don’t punish any wrong behaviors. It’s strictly positive reinforcement throughout the training. And when my brother mentions that what he is talking about is this course won’t teach any methods involving choke collars, they won’t talk about jerking on a leash. I have seen courses out there where if you are doing leash control only, it’s off the leash control. So your dog will heal while your walking while he’s not on a leash. They train their dogs. They stay by your side by actually throwing circle chains at the dogs, but to get him to stay there because if he leaves he gets hit with these chains and essentially gets whipped with chains and obviously that has a lot of negative drawbacks, negative feedback that your dog is going to perceive that is

coming from you and then resenting you and also this is not fun for the dog and not only that your neighbors will probably turn you in. very, very true. The first thing that I want to attack here and show you is that our training kit is going to be designed a little way that you might not be used to and it might sound a little bit funny. This first section we are going to introduce clicker training to you and it will flow pretty well, will give you some background, will show you some of the benefits, will talk to you about how to get started, how to get setup, all those such things and this first portion will flow quite smoothly. However, we designed the last portion, because there will be a few good hours of audio here to listen to very differently. It won’t be designed to listen to from beginning to end. It would be very segmented and that was done for a purpose. We created it that way so it could be well index. So if your dogs’ only problem is he pees on the carpet and you really don’t care about barking and you don’t care about biting and you don’t care about leash control or whatever you can specifically reference whatever chapter the party training is in and you don’t have to wade through one and half hour of audio to find what you are specifically looking for. So just beware of that when you are going through this kit and it gets a little bit choppy in the sections where we spend specific chapters on the CDs and breakdown the specific behaviors and how to correct them.

Shaping And Molding Behaviors By Using Clicker Training

Clicker training has a lot of other benefits that you may not be aware of and I think it’s extremely important to point out to you. We first sort to stumble across this with parrot training and you may or may not own a parrot but the benefits are the same. We notice that even though we didn’t have this in mind at the beginning when we were trick trained the birds and learnt to teach them what behaviors were rewarding, what clickers we started training them a whole host of behaviors, the bond that was created was significantly increased between ourselves and the parrots and the same holds true for dogs. Not only that but on top of all everything that Chet’s saying our birds responded much, much, much faster the sound of a clicker. Instead of saying “good” or something else to kind of bridge the gap between the animal does a behavior you want and when you actually give it a reward the clicker hits an exact moment that the animal does desired behavior. Now that may not sound important but if you put in perspective if you want the dog to walk over and sit on to a map, which we will get into later you want the dog to first at least just look at the map. You can’t get that with saying a verbal bridge.

The dog looks at the map, you click it you get a reward. It takes a step towards the map, you give it a click and rewarded and in pinpointing every single move that the dog makes until you eventually shape and mold the exact behavior that you are looking for. What he is talking about works in everything. It even works believe it or not with training goldfish. They are known to be trained on a clicker and you can just very, very specifically reward exactly tiny, tiny small increments towards the dog’s good behavior and that’s some of the benefits that come in to play versus correcting the dog in a bad portion and he doesn’t really know what he is doing, right. So he feels confined in a worse relationship. To kind of explain how this works and get you a better feel of exactly why this works. I want to give a little bit of background into where, I don’t know if it will be a clicker training that got started but operate conditioning got started and I wanted to tell you a story and this is probably going to be in some other materials of ours that you are listening to or reading but talking about Dr. Skinner and I believe its in the 1920s, Dr. Skinner was a scientist that did a lot of studies on rats and I will tell this story real brief and short, but essentially what he did is he would take a hungry rat and he put it in a cage and his goal was to see if he could train this rat, which is a laboratory rat to run over to a food dispenser that had a little lever on it, raise its paw, put his paw on the dispenser, push down on the paw, which would activate the dispenser and drop the food palate into the rat’s cage. He will run over there , munch on it and eat it. So that every time the rat got hungry he knew that he could just walk over, stump on that paddle and he would get a palate. Now that seems very complex and it’s got a long way to go but Dr. Skinner proved that this was possible and what he did like my brother mentioned just a little while ago was he broke it down into tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny steps. We are going to teach you throughout this course how to do that on all sorts of behavioral problems with your dog to all sorts of tricks to all sorts of games you can play and what he did at first is he imagined there is a rat in the cage and there’s nothing else in this cage except this food dispenser and the rat just kind of wondered around sniffing different things and he waited until the rat knows just sort of accidentally, by happen chance looked at the feeder, just looked at it and immediately he hit a little remote button that he had on his feeder and it dropped and went “click”, what we mean by that when he hit that remote the pellet dropped and it made a click at the bottom of this cage and that click pricked up the rat’s ears. He saw the food palate, he ran over and he ate it and that was certainly the beginning of where all this clicker training staff came from and too small, small steps that didn’t take too long for every time the rat looked at the feeder he got a food pellet being clicked in the bottom of his cage that he realized gosh all I have to do is look at this food dispenser when I am hungry and I get a pellet and pretty soon the rat was constantly staring at the food dispenser and then what happened

is Dr. Skinner phased that out and he made the rat not only look at the dispenser but he stopped rewarding just looking at the dispenser and waited for the rat got bored and accidentally took a step towards this dispenser and then he hit the button and dropped the palate and it clicked on the bottom of his cage. So then the rat would start taking steps towards the dispenser to earn a reward and earn a treat and it got even further and to take this along he got it so he will take all the steps and would actually bump right up against the food dispenser clicking and rewarding with pellets the entire time. Then he waited, so he accidentally bumped into the lever and clicked and rewarded all that time making sure that every step towards the direction of eventually stepping on the pellet dispenser was rewarded and every time the rat got distracted and looked the other way or walked the other way the rat was not given any sort of reward whatsoever. And once he got the rat to the point where he was up against the food dispenser the rat was constantly just touching the dispenser, he phased that out. He stopped rewarding that until the rat got bored and started sniffing around the dispenser and accidentally stepped on the lever with his foot and as soon as he did he rewarded him by dropping a pellet in there and pretty soon he just repeating the steps over and over and over again to a hungry rat. The rat just got the picture that all he had to do is step on this dispenser, this little lever and he got a reward and basically clicker training was born in a sense and its then taken on to a whole lot of levels and then taught. Its definitely a growing field and as well as it should be because its extremely effective and if you train a rat just want to let you know that you should have a lot of faith that you can train your dog, you can train your cat, your goldfish, your dolphin, whatever you have, its possible and that’s show some of the background of how this staff got started.

Training Sessions, Clickers & Conditioning To start doing the training with your dog it’s important that you first discover what his favorite treat is. It doesn’t have to even have to be his favorite treat but any kind of treat that he doesn’t get in a normal everyday basis, not his dog food, he’s not really going to get excited to work for the dog. We have found with our golden retriever that he absolutely will die for marshmallows or cheese. Those may not be the healthiest things but fortunately due to how all the clicker training is structured it doesn’t necessarily have to be the most healthy treat for your dog that’s not the point, obviously your main diet should be healthy for him, but just something that your dog will be willing to do that little extra step and you have his undivided attention when you have this treat in view. Pretty obvious how to find a good treat for your dog.

In fact you probably already know by now that one way to do it is to just have several different items out on a table or on a tray, you could have cheese, you could have marshmallows, you could have strips of chicken, strips of beef, pretty much anything you could imagine that you like to eat that your dog may like to eat and let him see which one he goes for first. If it does not make a difference then you are well on your way. Depending on how you got this kit it may have come with a little training bag for treats and stuff, which will just hook on to your bell pocket or click on to your waste band of your pants. This item is difficult to get a hold of sometimes. So it may not be included with your kit, it’s not a necessity. You can always just keep the treats in your pocket, but regardless you want your treats nearby the entire time so that you are not fishing for the treat, you can get it through your dog immediately. There are a couple other points that I would like to bring out with finding a reward for your dog and it’s extremely important that all people struggle with it. The reward that you gives your dog is going to vary on entirely different scenarios. Your dog when you start out training him inside your living room with no distractions might go for a small piece of anything, it could be a cracker, it could be whatever but may be when you get outside and there’s a few more distractions and he has the option to go smell things and go to sniff trees in a park that he has never been to and all such things you might need a whole lot more enticing treat. You also might run into the scenario where your dog just doesn’t seem to even care about the tree and when that happens you need to possibly focus on restricting the dog’s diet a little bit so that you are training him right before meals and that you are training him limiting his diet so that he is hungry when you are training him and you are feeding him throughout the day during this period, so he is a little more motivated and the other snare that could happen is he might not be a fan of treats. You might need to find that he just really loves to be pet or he really just wants to hold his favorite toy or he wants to do something and you are going to know what that is better than us, maybe it’s a little scratch behind the ear or on his butt whatever you are going to feel that out but beware that treats might not be the one specific answer for what your dog is going to be rewarded with. And I want to touch back on what Chet said about you may have to restrict your dog’s diet. This is not in any way starvation to your dog, its simply feeding your dog treats when he is hungry and doing that before meal. In our case we feed our dogs three small meals during the day, they get breakfast, they get lunch, they get dinner.

It is very important that throughout this training that you do not leave your dog’s food out the entire day. That’s not going to work if the dog has a buffet available all day because why would you want to treat. But again just to reiterate if this is not in any way starving your dog just simply taking advantage of the routine points during the day where he knows he is going to get fed and also this creates a better bond with you and your dog because its creating a time with the dog and you everyday that he can look forward to playing with you and just having interaction with you. There are a couple of things, which you might find that will help you with this, especially if you don’t work at home or you have to be away a lot of the time you can buy automatic dog feeders that are basically electronic and they will measure out portions of the food and will dump a certain amount of food in your dog’s dish at different time intervals that you decide on and not where you cannot have to always constantly be try ing to find the dog food bag, and filling up your dog’s food bowl, dog pull but he can have a set amount of food that will be very regulated and he can multiple times a day. Another point we are feeding your dogs like we said three times a day is certainly we might not have thought about. There was an experiment and I might not get this quite right but I think it’s called the Pavlov, something Pavlov. Basically the scientist Dr. Pavlov was doing a study where he would ring a bell and the feed the dog, ring a bell and feed the dog throughout his scientific studies and what he found is after a certain amount of time he would ring the bell and the dog would salivate. The dog might not even been hungry but the mind of the dog and the mind of even humans has a whole lot of power and if you think you are hungry, if the dog thinks this time to eat he’ll be hungry. So if you are feeding your dog multiple small meals a day he is going to get hungrier more often because he is excited to eat more often and you are going to have more opportunities to present your treats to him if you are having trouble with him taking treats. And that I guess brings us to our next point how many times a day do you want to plan on feeding your dog, but how many little training sessions would you like to have? It’s a common misconception. A lot of people think that you have to train your dog for 15 minutes or 30 minutes at a time and it really varies from dog to dog but with quicker training because its so powerful you want to give a chance to your dog, you want to give a chance to think about everything that has just happened. So what we recommend is about five to eight small, quick, short and sweet training sessions throughout the day. You can do a bunch. I guess the first objection would be how are you going to get that in to a day. If you work, you can’t come home. They don’t have to split evenly throughout the day. Say you wake up at six o’clock and you are eating your breakfast, you can do a quick

training session. A couple, maybe half hour later you get out of the shower to another quick training session. The training sessions only and listen carefully here for an adult should be three to five minutes and no longer. It’s important not to expand and exceed their attention span or the dog will quickly become bored with training and want nothing to do with it. And how early can you train the dog? Quite honestly you can train a puppy. The puppies’ attention span is going to be a lot shorter and with this case you should only train him really for a 30-second to a two-minute training session, no more or you will lose your dog’s attention. You can expand on this when your dog obviously becomes a veteran of trick training and masters a whole lot of things and can grow but growing his learning ability but definitely you are going to want to follow these guidelines when you are first starting out. The first step you want to take in getting your dog used to understanding what a clicker means and just the whole idea behind the training is sit down with him one day, have your treats ready in your pocket or anywhere just nearby and just simply click the clicker and toss him a treat. Let him think about it just for a second. Click the clicker again and toss him another treat. You want to repeat this quite a few times until he realizes every time you click that clicker he gets a treat, which there is a very, very, very important thing to remember here and this is only one thing you walk away from with this section of the CD, please, please keep in mind how important it is that you do not ever click your clicker around your dog unless you give him a treat. The clicker is your verbal promise to him that you will under no circumstances 100% of the time give him a treat every time the clicker goes off, no exceptions or you will lose your dog’s trust and it will really mess up the training with your dog. Yeah, you quickly phase out your progress. What he is talking about here is also known as a “bridge” and if you are familiar with such training terms and the clicking sound is a bridge and what it does is it bridges the gap between the time that the dog does this specific behavior correctly and the time he gets rewarded and the reason that you have the clicker is so let’s say your dog sits and then you go to give him a treat and he stands up. Well, now he doesn’t know what portion that he did correctly. He doesn’t know if it was the standing up that got him the treat, that he gets eat out your hand, its just that clicker because its so specific, its so precise that you can train him do just the minute tiny little things by raising his ears, wiggling his nose, or any sort of specific thing because it is going to immediately bridge and then reward your dog.

The Power Of Targeting You are going to know when you’ve gotten to this point where you are clicking the clicker and giving your dog a treat, clicking the clicker and giving your dog a treat where he has got it and the point you are going to know about, and the whole point I guess is so that every time you click it he absolutely knows he gets a treat and its all on his body language. Just watch his body language when you start clicking that clicker after you have done multiple, multiple reps, and you see his ears prick up and he looks directly at you. You know that he is now expecting that treat every time that you sound that thing. And then you are ready to move on. Now some of you are going to run into the problem like we did where we first started doing this and started conditioning an Australian shepherd to get used to the clicker and all of a sudden he was very afraid of the clicker. You have to remember the dog’s ears are a lot more sensitive than ours and it was extremely loud, it was extremely overbearing and he was very scared of the clicker and he would see the clicker and he would run away. So there are a couple of things that you need to be aware of so that that doesn’t happen. One is maybe always wearing the clicker on you. There are several clickers that come with belt loops with retractable cords that come out of own so that you can have it on your belt and it will extend much like a child leash that grows and expands or a dog leash that grows and expands with how far away the dog goes. You can attach this to your belt loop. You can always attach this if you don’t have one like that or you can’t find one. You know it’s attached to a magnet to it and stick it on your belt. If you just want it to be accessible and get the dog used to seeing it so he is not afraid of it because he will see it and when he sees it you want to go and hide if he is afraid of the noise. The other thing you can do is that when you are clicking is to possibly put it in your pocket. When you click so the sound is muffled and its not as sharp and piercing to your dog’s ears, put it behind your back, you could cover it in tape so its not as overbearing, just a couple of things like that just so he gets used to it. Also be very careful so that you aren’t clicking it in his ear and just being careful I guess and it is really important we talk about this in just one section earlier but I guess kind of jumping back ‘cuz we skipped this part. Make sure that you keep your clicker out of the reach of your kid. If you have kids in the house or you have a spouse who has obsessive-compulsive reasons to click the clicker make sure that it’s away from them. Again just to reinforce that every time you click the dog gets a treat. You don’t want your child or anybody running around clicking it. Yeah because if you have your kid run around and clicking the singer hundred times your dog will become

desensitized to it because he has been hearing the click and he is not getting the reward or in some cases the dog may be freaked out, which escalates the problem and if he already doesn’t like the clicker it will just make it worse. So once you are at that point and you are at the point where okay the dog obviously gets it that you click and he gets a reward. There’s obviously some good starting points that you are going to want to start at and this can depend on what sort of dog that you have, whether he is a very timid, shy, calm dog or whether he is a very aggressive hyper dog. Some dogs, our Australian shepherds that is a little bit on the hyper side that when we started training they were just running in circles, staying around it and it was just like what can I do to calm this dog down. So what we did is we would take a piece of treat, we will show it to him in our hand and we get down on his level and we would show him our hand and close the hand and the dog would want to get in there, eat the treat, be all excited about the treat, but what we did is waited till he calmed down even just a little bit and then we clicked and then we gave him the treat as soon as may be he is biting on the hand. We waited for the release of his bite on the hand, not obviously a hard bite but just a gentle gnawing at it looking, trying to get in and get him the treat. It’s in between our fingers waiting until he relaxes or he backs off, clicking a reward. So he gets the point that oh if I just relax, if I just back off and I calm down I get rewarded and do that to the point where your dog is not paying attention but just settling down somewhat so you can get him to be somewhat controllable. On the other hand if your dog, like a golden retriever, if he is a little too mellow, that’s again we want to just make sure you are doing your training session before his meals. Yeah, his attention span will be a little bit keener and sharper. Another thing which you can do, that’s a good thing to start off once your dog is at the point where, you can start this off with a shy dog or once your more hyper dog is calmed down a little bit is what’s called targeting. Now we did this with parrots and it was extremely, extremely effective in getting very scared birds to come out of their cage and it works very well with dogs too. Not that the dog is scared but as far as learning how to obey commands and what you can use is what’s called the targeting stick and it can just be any sort of stick, it could be a yardstick if you wanted it to be, it could be any sort of stick whatsoever, a pointer and we would put the stick if your dog is sitting there in front of your dog and wait till may be touch the stick to the dog’s paw and then we click and we would throw the treat at the dog. We don’t let him to get out of our hand with further treat away from the dog. So he goes out and gets the treat and so he realizes every time that the stick touches his paw that he gets a reward and then we would just like we would teach you doing everything back the sticks slowly away, may be just an inch away so that we

are not the ones touching his paw and wait until if he already understood he is a sharp dog, move to his spot to touch the stick and then got rewarded and if he didn’t catch up on that what we would do is we would position the stick in some sort of position that the dog most likely to move to next after he got bored of waiting for us to do something. So that if he decided to walk away in the path of him walking away he accidentally was bumped into the stick and then we would immediately click him reward until the point that he understood, gosh every time my paw touches this stick I get a reward and when he gets to that stage back it off two inches, three inches, six inches, a foot, you know two feet, all over the house and rewarding multiple, multiple times during each step so he understands where to go to follow you to start understanding he needs to go certain places to earn a reward and this will come into play in later stages of the training when you need to teach and lure him crawling and coming to you and those such things, so it’s important and its also a fairly easy step to start off with. A couple of points that might help you if you feel like you are trying to juggle too many things is like Dave said earlier on; get yourself a treat bag so that you can easily have the treats on your belt in an easy accessible pouch and take the clicker and attach it to this stick somehow that you are using. If it’s a yardstick you can glue it, you can tape it on to the stick, you can wrap it around with rubber bands, whatever you wanted to do, but just so that the stick and the clicker are one so you can just grab them at the same time and not have to have a separate hand holding the clicker and you play with how you hold the clicker depending on whether you want to do that or not, but it just makes it easier to see have a free hand available to you, one holding a treat and one holding the stick and you can be training and doing everything multitasking.

Getting Your Dog To Sit Teaching your dog the sit commands one of the first out of the three major tricks that you want to teach it. Sit would be the first one you want to teach it to stay and you want to teach it to lay down on command. These are the three core tricks to train your dog. All of these things can be done without ever touching your dog. You start out with your clicker in your left hand and your treat on the right hand. When are going to take your treat out of your treat pocket or out of your pants pocket or wherever it is. You will immediately notice that your dog is looking at you because obviously you have something that it wants. To teach the dog to sit on commands again with a clicker on your left hand and the food in your right hand start walking towards your dog. As soon as he sits down click the clicker and toss the food out to the side. Now the reason you threw it down to the ground over to the side is so the dog gets up out of the sit position, that’s very important and then he gets the treat.

You want to continue doing this each time making sure that you hold the food, the treat, just a little above the dog’s nose and by raising the treat back and ov er the dog’s head it is going to force him or her to sit down. Again as soon as it sits down click the clicker and toss the treat out to the side. If your dog doesn’t naturally sit down when you are trying this try another method. You can just simply sit there, take out the treat and just wait and wait and as soon as your dog sits down click the clicker and again toss the treat out to the side making sure it gets out of the sit position to get it. And you just repeat this and repeat this and pretty soon your dog will have this trick on you. There are a couple of things that are important to know here. One of them is that you are going to want to incorporate a verbal cue when doing this, you are going to want to put the treat above your dog’s head and he finally sits, you say the word sit along with clicking the clicker the instant that he does sit so that you can attach the cue to the behavior. You could also incorporate different hand cues if you want a certain hand cue to be the symbol to actually sit we can incorporate that in also. Keep in mind that the dog doesn’t have to sit because you told him to sit. As long as he gets rewarded every time he sits it doesn’t matter how you get him to do it. The point is that he understands that every time he sits he gets a click, so you could be watching TV and it doesn’t have to take any extra time out of your life, you can just be walking around your house and you notice him sitting and if you have the clicker on you click and toss him a treat while you are in your own home and the whole process will go a lot faster. You can do this when you are going through a feeding times, all those sorts of things. Now there is a couple of other things that will come up in teaching your dog to sit that you will want to focus on and that is you want your dog to sit for longer than one or two seconds. You might want him to sit and hold that sit for a couple of seconds, 10 seconds, a minute, five minutes, may be want him to sit in the corner and not bug someone, one of your guests who happens to be allergic to dogs, something like that. What you would do to lengthen out that process and get him to hold this sit longer and longer is once he knows that we will give the sit command he automatically sits and he gets a reward. Now give him the same command again and wait an extra second before you click and give him the treat and then an extra two seconds and three and four and five and so on and so forth until you are holding it out for as long of a period of time as you want so that your dog learns okay I have to hold this sit until she says that I am done. Now what you are going to want to do is you are going to need a release command with this type of behavior so that the dog knows its okay and maybe you can just say “okay” and the word “okay” is combined with the clicker and a treat thrown to the dog so that the dog knows okay that’s done. I don’t have to

worry about that any more so that you can eventually phase out the clicker in later parts of the training. So you don’t always have to have a clicker on you and the dog will be released with the okay command instead of being released with the clicker command. The other thing you are going to want to be able to do is have your dog vary the times that he is able to sit and you don’t want to do this by I forgot the name of the term but variable length training is what I am trying to get out. You are going to want to have him hold this sit for 10 seconds, then have him hold it for 15, then have him hold it for five, then have him hold it for 30, then have him hold it for 20, and just vary the amount of time that you make him hold the sit so he becomes really, really used to waiting for your release command, your okay and the clicker sound before he breaks his sit instead of just holding the sit for however long he wants to until he feels comfortable. He needs to know that that’s not how it is done, that it needs to be sitting until you give him the okay command. And that’s done multiple times throughout the training course, its not something where during one training session you do 30-second reps or another training session that’s 15-second reps. You want to after the dog understands the sit command and sits and he knows that then you want to start throwing him the changes or variables for him.

Getting Your Dog To Stay The stay command is a very important command to be able to teach your dog. It can keep it safe when you are near a busy road, at a park, you can tell to stay while you have to go grab on your kids. You keep your kids from running in the street or whatever it is there is a number of awesome, awesome reasons for teaching this trick or you just simply want a well-behaved dog, this is a great command to teach. You start by having your dog sit, you give the sit command and you tell it to stay. You click the clicker and say okay and toss him the treat. After you do this, take a step back, tell him to sit again, say stay, pause for a second, click, say okay, and toss him the treat. The reason for saying okay is a release command like we talked about in a sit session of this audio series. It’s very important that your dog understands when to stay and when it’s okay to move about again. So you do this again. You tell your dog to sit, tell him to stay and each time you mov e back a little bit further, a little bit further, a little bit further, every time until you are five-six feet away and then you want to work on the duration that your dog actually stays there. Up to this point, it’s very important that you only have your dog stay for just a second or two. So again you sit, stay, click and reward. So just about that time in there you don’t want to work on how long he is until he really understands the idea behind it.

So the second phase to this is getting your dog obviously to sit for certain amount of time, or stay for a certain amount of time and before we get to that I want to kind of interrupt myself and tell you that if your dog starts to whine while you give the stay command and he starts to whine don’t reward him. If you give the stay command and you walk back a foot then the dog starts to walk off don’t reward him. Then just go back again and tell him to sit, tell him to stay, then you yourself take a step backwards, click, give the release command and toss him his treat. It’s very, very, very critical never to reward a behavior that you potentially don’t want. If he is winding, if he is barking, may be you don’t want your dog moving at all during the stay command, you want him to just freeze in one position. If that is the case then make sure that you don’t reward if he is moving his head. Then however you want you can really shape and mould his behavior by rewarding only a behavior that you want and not rewarding or just simply ignoring the dog if he does a behavior that you don’t want. So once you have got, you have got to the step where you are about five-six feet back, seven feet back, and little bit further, a little bit further, and your dog understands that he is supposed to stay there you want to start stretching out the amount of time that he sits and he stays in one spot. To do this, it’s just like the sit command. You tell him to sit, you tell him to stay, take a few steps back, and instead of just clicking and rewarding after one second, you want to give it two seconds, three seconds, four seconds, and then click and reward and just go on to change the amount of time in between your command and the reward so that he doesn’t get used to always staying for exactly five seconds and then when he thinks five seconds is up he decides to run off. If that is the case again you don’t reward that. Only reward the exact behaviors you want and then eventually you have it up about 30 seconds, 35 seconds, 40 seconds, two minutes, and really work on this as long and shape it until the dog stays as long as you want him to. A couple of other things that are important. Obviously there is always going to be funky things that are thrown into the picture. We learnt this first when we started training parrots where the animal we are teaching the behavior like if you start teaching your dog how to sit and then you want to teach him how to stay, but in the command you really have to break everything you are teaching down into various simple basic steps and take him inch by inch, half inch by half inch if you have to and I just want to really drive home the point what my brother is talking about with first teaching that dog to just sit for the same amount of time just with you standing further away is basically how that works and then you work on how long it takes. Don’t try to make it long and far away at the same time or mix up those steps because it’s just not going to work as well.

When your dog already knows to sit, it’s just a whole, whole lot easier for him to sit while you are further away and sit while you are further away and it’s a nice smoother transition from there to make him sit for longer and longer periods of time than jumping out and just getting yourself all out of order. There is also a couple of things that are going to come into play like distractions of being in certain environments you are going to want to be in and I will jump into those here. You go to want throw distractions at your dog and his sit commands, for example have him sit near an open door and then go outside, may be that’s the door he really likes to go out of, have him sit before dinnertime. So its like super, super rewarding and do a training session with a bull of food sitting there, have him go the park and sit, have him go the park and sit next to the door, then in an open van or an open car if your dog likes to go for a car ride, have him sit and then open the door and make sure that he doesn’t go in there and fall for that bait of opening the door. Now there is a trick here. You don’t want to say come on boy, get in the car and then punish him for not holding his stay, you can’t be stupid about the whole thing, you don’t trick your dog but present a distraction where the dog has to make his own choice completely on his own without any egging on from your commands or anything whether he is going to hold the stay or not. You are going to want to teach the stay in regions also besides holding just a sit-stay like my brother had talked about. You are going to want to hold it in front of the door where not necessarily rewarding the dog for sitting in front of the door but rewarding this process for not crossing that barrier from inside to outside so if you have to open up the door to go get some groceries or carry something in you don’t have the dog jet out and have him cut your legs out from under you when you are brining something heavy in the door so he don’t come outside or you don’t lose those sorts of things that will run out into the street. So just have that in the back of your mind when you are training these behaviors and stand up with your dog and after you master the sit and stay commands go next to a door, open the door and tell him to stay. It doesn’t have to be an outside door, it could be just a door that you don’t want your dog to go into, for example we have a parrot room in our house but we don’t want our dogs going into because dogs could eat birds and that’s not a good thing. So what I could do is I could open up that door to that room and I could walk in and I could tell him to stay and if he stays outside that room I will click and reward him and if he comes in he does not get a reward and if he is either on a training diet or a meal time and he is a little bit hungry and that’s what he is after is that reward where lots of pets and lots of attention and he never gets it every time he crosses that barrier he will learn that he is not supposed to do that and

every time you tell him to stay he will not go into that room and you can train those dogs per region that you want them to stay in. One of the biggest fallbacks we found at our golden retriever with the distraction technique they were talking about is other’s dogs or animals at a park or just anywhere if you are walking your dog, a lot of dogs get excited to see another dog. We cover this more later on in this series but just as a distraction during training above the hardest thing you are going to get next to giving your dog’s food like his dinner and having him stay is we found having another dog in the same room that is free to run around and do whatever it wants, y et the dog, your training has to stay put. So if you are really putting a challenge and you have two dogs and your neighbor has a dog, after you have mastered the sit and stay commands try throwing him a distraction pattern when another dog run around and then if he’ll still do it when that dog is there you know that your dog has mastered this trick.

Mastering The Down Command Getting your dog to master the down command or to lie down on command is very much a needed behaviors and your good fortune is very simple to learn. It’s basically as simple as seeing your dog lying down and if your dog, and the key to this is that your dog already knows what the clicker means in a big way. So I wouldn’t teach this trick first, I would teach something basic like a sit first which is going to be a little bit easier, then the lie down, but master the sit so that the dog really really knows that when every time you click that clicker, he did something right, he doesn’t know what it is, but he did something right and he has a treat coming. So that being said go about your regular business in the morning and your whole routine, you don’t have to take extra time out of your day or anything, sit down and eat your breakfast at the breakfast table and just be aware of what’s your dog is doing, if you see him lie down click and toss him a treat, believe me he will understand what that clicker means. He will know that he did something and he will go and probably come over to you and start offering other commands that you may have taught him, do not reward any more and then go back and wait for him to get bored and lie down again and then click and give him a reward and do that over and over and over again until basically he has got the command. Now there is a couple of things that could obviously come into play, just like everything on this that we are teaching here. One is may be you have a big room or may be your dog doesn’t like to hang out with you in your breakfast time.

If that’s the case get yourself in a smaller room, may be a bathroom, may be a very small bedroom, may be anywhere where your dog’s pretty confined, you can see him no matter where he goes you may be close the door so he can’t run away and be distracted. He has to hang out with you so that eventually the dog is not going to stand up forever and he has to lie down and just to make sure that every time he does you click, he perks up, gets real excited and you toss him a treat and just so that you catch it every time until he obviously is laying down on command and eyes are gazing at you, I am sorry, I shouldn’t say on command. He is just lying down. As soon as he eats his treat he lays back down again. Eyes staring at you and he is just very eager and hoping he is doing the right thing knowing that every time he is lying down he gets a reward. When you have it to that point is the time that you are going to want to attach a clue to the behavior. I mentioned that your dog has mastered it and you will know because your dog is always lying down during your training sessions and when he is doing that start writing, I don’t know how to explain it, its writing the same sort of rhythm where you toss a treat out, he gets it and he immediately lies down again. Catch him in that rhythm where he is so used to just eating treat, going back, lying down, eating treat, going back, and lying down, catch him instead of let him lie down without saying a command or giving him a command with a hand signal, say “down” right before he sits down or lies down and then as soon as he does you click and you toss him a reward and then say “down” and attach that even though he is already doing it without your saying it. Make it so that that word is always associated with the behavior when he goes down and once he has got that down, it hasn’t confused him, you back it off even further and you stop staying down every time. This will happen with every animal we know, parrots, dogs, but the animal would just offer the behavior over and over and over and over and over again even if its not the behaviors that we want him to do, may be he will resort to the behavior that he likes to do the most and may be “down” is the one he likes to do the most. Whatever the case just make sure that you are mixing it up so that he knows that he just can’t lie down when you don’t say anything and expect a reward. He needs to hear the word down before expecting a reward. And one thing we haven’t talked about yet that needs to be covered is it’s important to only give the command once. A lot of times you will hear different people and listen for it now that I am telling you about it, I am sure you will notice it lot more, you will look at the dog and say sit, come on sit, sit, sit, good and finally after like the fifth time of saying sit the dog finally does it. Although that person is doing is basically undoing all the training that’s ever been done. Make sure that you do not reward your dog unless he does it after you saying it once. If you have to repeat the command don’t do it, ignore the dog, walk away

and then come back and try it again just so that you don’t have to tell him to stay, stay, stay, you know I mean I know after hearing this you know make more sense to you, but just make sure that you give the command once and make sure he does it and only reward it after you have only said it once. Keep in mind that your dog, however you train your dog is exactly how it is going to be in the end, so just make sure that everything that he is doing from step A to step Z is exactly how you want it. So this brings us to the end of our first session.

Conclusion Of Part One – What’s To Come We certainly hope you have enjoyed it and you are going to find a whole bunch of other and more advanced techniques and training on our second session CD that came of your kit, its going to go over things like biting, aggression towards children, aggression towards strangers, spouses being territorial, barking at neighbors, barking at postmen, barking at whatever begging, barking, teaching your dog to come on command through retrieve on command, teaching you just about any of the advanced tricks that you can apply with your dog, coming up on the next series.

Training To Come On Command To teach your dog to come on commands can be pretty fun, can be pretty simple and not hard to do at all. If you have a puppy, its going to make it just a little bit easier but if you have an older dog it will also work. What you are going to want to do is basically train your dog to understand that every time you call his name great things happen and not just with food this time. We have been teaching a lot of the other tricks for a lot of food but you are going to want a lot of pets, happy praise along with the food for this one and in this command you are going to want to pick his most favorite treat in the world. You might have been able to get away with a mediocre treat or one that your dog wasn’t the most fond of but he liked it a little bit better than dry nasty dog food but this trick requires the best treats possible and the reason is you don’t want to call your dog by name and basically sucker him into coming to you and then you grab him by the collar and you shove him into his dog kennel. That’s not fun and so we are going to teach you how to call him by name just when you want him to come near you. This is not going to be used to call him, to come to you when you want to put him away or put him in a crate or put him in the kennel, those will be separate commands and we will teach those separately with words like go to your kennel, go into your crate, those sorts of things but its very important not to try to confuse those and very important to remember when you call your dog’s name make it happy and don’t put him in the kennel, those sorts of things or smack him or do something that is bad in nature. So basically what you are going to need is you are going to need his best treat, you are going to need yourself and eventually you are going to need a few other people to help grow this behavior. Its going to start off with just in a controlled little distraction environment, maybe your living room, your puppy is sitting there and you go up a few feet away and you clap happily and say I don’t know whatever your dog’s name is, Spark come, and you act all excited, so the puppy is happy seeing you. So he runs over there just to play and you click and you give him a treat and you just do this a whole lot just like everything a whole lot where you go back to playing and then you clap and say Spark come and he comes again and again and again and you just basically repeat that over and over and over again in different situations, in different spots in the house, in different spots outside your yar d and then you increase distractions where you are going to let your puppy get distracted by, I don’t know a certain smell that he is smelling in the yard and then right at that instant you tell him to come but not from far away, don’t get off and

stay real close by this time and have those treats and as he seems to be distracted you tell him to come and he comes over to you and you click a reward and when you have this so it is just down pat, you can take it into other things, right Dave. Yeah, our Australian shepherd enjoyed a game. We actually trained him instead of saying come or calling him by name, he comes actually to really extremely high pitch whistles. So what we started doing is playing a little game with him where we would walk off when he was busy playing or whatever and we go and hide in another room, either in the bathroom, the bedroom, we have a walk in closet where we might hide in there and do this high pitch whistle and it was just a hoot watching and listening to him. He would run around the house trying to find you is just a game that you can play after he has learned the come command to keep it from being a stagnant routine of him and it just keeps it exciting and obviously when he finds you, make a lot of praise and pet him and give him a treat and like just I said earlier always make it a positive experience, never ever ever under any circumstance call your dog if you are going to put him away, if you are going to punish him, just again to reiterate make sure that is always a positive experience for your dog and that he is always looking for it to come in when you call him. Very, very true.

The How & Why Of Properly Crate Training Your Dog

It’s important that your dog is properly crate trained, so in an emergency if you have to take it to the vet or just for regular checkups it knows the crate is a safe place to be, also if you have guests that are allergic to dogs, afraid of dogs, or if you have little kids over and you have a big dog, its just a smart thing to be able to have your dog go to his crate every time he is told. There are two ways of doing this. If your dog is a puppy, it’s probably the best time to start doing it. With our Australian shepherd every night we put him in his crate, to go to bed, we feed him in his crate, he has got to sleep in his crate, he ate in his crate and every morning we take him out, we play with him and he just knew that it was a safe place to be and then after a while of doing that we started saying go to your crate, go to your kennel and he would just go at his own free will if we left it open, we catch him sleeping in there just because he felt comfortable in there and it was always used to being in and around his crate ever since he was a puppy. If your dog is an adult dog obviously it’s a little bit too late to do that method, especially if your dog is simply afraid of the crate. There are a number of steps you can take to get your dog used to the crate and be willing to go into it. To start it out, you want to click and reward anything that shows any bit of progress towards the crate. If your dog is just definitely afraid of the crate, say we have our crate in the laundry room, so I use that just for the sake of keeping it easy here.

Let’s say that your dog is completely afraid of the crate, go on to the laundry room and shut the door behind you and if it is a decent size laundry room and so the dog is in there with the crate, unless he is really panicky then you want to take a few steps back. But just reward him for even looking at the crate. If he takes one glance at it, give him a click and reward. Every time he gets a little bit closer or he takes a step forward towards the crate give him a click and reward. If he starts to kind of sniff the crate give him a click and reward him. Every time that he moves just even one step closer to the crate click and reward for every little step. When he makes a big breakthrough, I am sure you are going to notice a couple of spots where he just won’t get past, he won’t get within two feet of the cage. He is okay with getting up to that point but he doesn’t quite want to touch it, whatever a little hurdle is, as soon as he gets past it, make sure you give him just a huge, huge, huge reward so he knows that he really did something right. Again click and reward but also some praise and some patting never hurts. Also another tip like we did with Taylor, as a puppy is we would like I said we put his dinner in there. Now this obviously only is a fact of which your dog isn’t terrified of the crate which obviously if he is terrified he takes the steps that I just talked about. If he isn’t terrified he just get in the routine and in a habit so that your dog knows every night he gets to go eat dinner in his crate and then when he has finished eating dinner you will let him out and you run outside, you play with him. He does his business out back or whatever and just make it a comfortable place for your dog so that he knows that he can feel secured in that. Like Dave said you are going to want to click the dog and reward every small step towards the process of him getting to the final goal, which is inside the crate and being inside the crate for a long period of time. So a couple of points that you are going to want to know there besides clicking every time he makes a step forward that you are going to want to stop, once you have your dog to the point where he knows that he has to put one or both paws may be inside the crate before you are to click and reward. Stop rewarding anything else besides that and only move on forward. Don’t ever reward just looking at the crate any more, just sniffing the crate any more, only reward actually the step you are on or moving towards and you can just do a lot of things with getting your dog comfortable with this by stuffing Kong toys. You can find them at local pet stores, and then stuff peanut butter or favorite treats in these Kong Toys so that he is a little bit distracted and he has got something that he likes to play with and going to be busy trying to dig the peanut butter out of so that he can have a little bit extra help in helping him overcome

that fear like Dave said eating inside the crate is another good option and that’s basically how you can do that with an older dog. Now a couple of points here. Your dog is afraid of being locked up there, in there and you are going to leave him and he doesn’t know where to go, only knows that you leave him. So what you are going to want to do is teach the dog that you come back to him and that you don’t just leave him in there and so just start off by closing the door, give him a click and reward just for getting the door even closed. Then leave for 10 seconds, then leave for 30 seconds and come back. Click and reward each time until the dog is okay with being in there for as long as you want. Don’t ever come back to the crate and open it if he whines or barks or basically don’t even let him see you. If he barks because then he will learn you accidentally be training him that barking brings you back and so if he is barking persistently you are just going to have to wait it out, hopefully you want to jump too far right of the back, you are going to have to wait it out and just stand out of sight until he has finished barking for I don’t know 15 seconds then walk into the room, click reward and let him out play and let him know that it was great but let him know that he only got out because he was quiet. If he ever gets out by whimpering, barking, winding, or whatever, its going to be really, really, really annoying, 1 a.m. at night when you are trying to go to bed after a long day of work and this dog won’t stop yipping because he wants you and he knows that gets your attention. You can’t let him know that that gets your attention. Now some points for some puppies. Puppies, especially smaller ones are going to have a little bit of bladder control issues and you’re not going to want to leave a puppy in a crate for eight hours and expect him to hold it because he is not going to do that. He is going to have a little bit of problem especially right of the back. But to get a puppy comfortable with it is the ideal situation because he has no stigmas about the crate, feed him in there, play with the toys and there like all those sorts of things you can also click him reward every step towards there but aside from that wait till maybe he is just about to fall asleep and go and put him inside the crate and pat him and may be loll him to sleep with the door open and then shut the door and leave him until he wakes up, come back, click him reward every time he gets up. If he is awake and he is not going to sleep let him be in there, put a toy in there and distract him or just let him be in there by himself. You can play with it on your own to see how it goes, shut the door for 10 seconds, click him reward if he doesn’t do any whining or anything like that and let him out and play with him and let him know he is a good boy, then put him back in the crate using the crate command or go to your crate or whatever it is going to be and basically just get him very comfortable with the fact that he is going to be okay in there. You are always going to come back and clicking and rewarding to get yourself through every hurdle to get him comfortable with every step of the

process whether its stopping from whining, whether its from just anything, just anything at all. Those are the basic steps that are going to help you out.

How To Stop Your Dog’s Annoying Barking How to stop your dog from barking? It’s so crucial to know because it is so maddening when a dog is relentlessly barking to come in, it is relentlessly barking to eat, it is begging, it is barking at gnats flying in the sky, cats that stroll by, neighbors that walk by, just all sorts of different things and one of the first things you need to know is why your dog is barking and besides, I guess I will just get into this. One of the things that can cause your dog from barking is boredom. So how you fix that I can’t really give you a clicker training, sort of a way to fix boredom in your dog, you need to adjust the dog’s environment so he has stuffs to do and may be you need to take him on more runs, may be you need to take him on walks, may be you have to hire somebody to walk him more regularly. Do anything so that you can have more interaction with your dog so he is not quite as bored and can get a little bit more physical activity and may be you can present him lots of toys, you cannot leave him in an area that will annoy neighbors too badly, those sorts of things to try to control the boredom issue. Other reasons he may bark are begging and being let in and I guess those are basically treated the same way. This is very similar, we mentioned parrots a lot but we do have extensive training in parrot background as well as dogs but a lot of parrots scream for their owners to call. Well it’s the same thing with dogs barking for something that they want and what you have to stand firm on is that your dog can never understand that barking gets your attention, barking gets you to come and act excited which you think is yelling but your dog just thinks its excitement. It can’t bring any of that to the dog. Let me put it this way. If you were a dog and you barked a few times and your owner always came over and said “what’s wrong, what’s wrong”, I would certainly bark a lot if I wanted to get petted because it would bring my owner over but if I barked a hundred times and nothing happened and I barked a hundred more and then a thousand more and ten thousand more times and my owner never came and my goal was to get my owner to come. An animal never continues to do an action that doesn’t bring a positive response for the animal and it will phase out in its own behavior and that’s what you need to stand firm on and you need to do. If you are sitting in your chair and your dog is barking at your door to let him in. You need to not even look at him. He can’t make eye contact, don’t make a movement towards the door, nothing, you need

to wait it out until your dog has stopped barking, go outside as soon as he stopped, click, give him a treat and let him come in and that’s how you can know. If you are preparing food and your dog is barking you need to stop, let your dog bark until he is blue on the face, until he stops barking and as soon as he stops barking click and reward and it’s a repetitive sort of thing. The problem is that too many owners have trained their dogs to bark because it brings food or they train their dogs to be let back in after they have eaten. There are all those sorts of things and its just not really understanding what your dog is doing and how your dog is trying to communicate with you. One thing I want to chime in on here, its important that might have been a little confusing though, its important that you don’t click and reward the dog as soon as he stops barking because then he will just learn that the barking gets the result he wants. You want to make sure that you don’t click him and reward until he has had enough time to forget that he was barking. In most cases its 15 seconds later or 30 seconds later but seriously count it out and time it or whatever you need to do but when the dog stops barking count 10, 20, 30 seconds whatever it is that you feel comfortable with and after he has been silent for a long enough time then click and reward, but just don’t get into any kind of habit of clicking right after he stops barking or you will reinforce the barking behavior. Also make sure to not reinforce barking in other situations like if your dog always barks as somebody walks by; try to limit the visibility to those people. You know dogs are going to want to alert people of changes and its not necessarily trying to accomplish anything. They are just trying to do something good, its kind of a natural instinct. So try to make it so they can’t see strangers they come up to your front door or into your yard or go by on the street and those sorts of things and don’t reward him again by when he barks, coming over, patting him and asking him what’s wrong. When they are outside make sure that he stops barking before you give him a reward and before you let the person come inside who is a stranger and those sorts of things. Looking at it from a dog’s perspective just to give you an idea of how quickly the situation can go from being tolerable to totally intolerable. Say you are watching TV and the dog is in the other room or he is outside. You will use that, it’s a little bit more clear. So the dog is outside and he barks for five seconds and you say okay well that’s annoying the neighbors. I better get up, get out of my lazy boy, get up and let the dog in. So the dog just learned okay I bark for five seconds I get let in. Well he does it again, the next day you are sitting there and watching TV and the dog starts barking again and he is barking and he is barking and you are just ignoring it and he barks, he barks, he barks. Finally it just aggravates you enough that you go outside and you start yelling at him, no bad dog.

Like I was saying earlier the dog thinks that is excitement and he doesn’t know what you are saying, he doesn’t know that the words you are saying are punishing. He just sees you yelling and screaming and playing with him and what he just learned is all it takes is 30 seconds of barking now to get your attention and then you come out, you play with him and you let him in and that’s exactly what he wants. This gets worse and worse and worse and pretty soon you just can’t tolerate it any more and he has been barking for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, and pretty soon you have totally trained your dog to just bark uncontrollably without even realizing it. So taking down into perspective I guess that just kind of let you know what its like from the dog’s point of view and how can you really confuse the dog because pretty soon after yelling and screaming at it doesn’t work, you are going to spank it or do a number of other things that will really damage your relationship with the dog and one thing that people actually will recommend that works great with clicker training, even especially in parrots too is putting the behaviors that you don’t want on queue. So with parrots it would be screaming, with dogs it is barking. If your dog barks just as an alternative if this last method didn’t work for you if your dog barks click, give it a reward. Wait again it barks, click, give it a reward, click give it a reward just like we have been teaching earlier in the CD or audio file and then you want to put a queue on it. So you say speak and he barks and you click a reward. You just want to time it right. So you say, you know you say speak, he barks, you click, you reward, and each time reinforcing that he only does it when you tell him to do it and then once you get him into this pattern of speak, he barks, you reward, speak, bark, reward and you want to just not same thing and when he barks ignore him and then do it again where you say speak and he barks and reward him until you have completely phased out his bark as a begging action and instead you only get that when you want it to, when you want him to do it on command. Because obviously the dog isn’t going to just bark if he knows you are going to leave the room and ignore him. So there is a couple of different ways that can help you out here. Another couple of points that I want to point in I want to jump back just a little bit and talk about the dog’s point of view if you yell at your dog or you hit your dog or whatever when he is barking. What your dog thinks of is , “okay I am going to bark because he always come” and play, so I am barking and barking and then I see you, yes you are coming and you get to play with me and then I run up to you and you hit me and the point I am coming from is gosh. Now every time, you know, he does not understand the barking is bad because we haven’t taught him because we have trained him that it is good because we are always rewarding him and now all of a sudden we have thrown him this curve

and now instead of, you know, getting excited, which is really your yelling, but he doesn’t know it, you hit him. So you are training him to resent you and you are training your dog that he gets beat now when you come outside and that’s where your dog has come in from and it is not a good angle to come at the barking issue or any issue that is bad whether it’s your dog peeing on the carpet, do not hit your dog. Not because he don’t deserve it or whatever, just because it doesn’t work. If it works, may be it would be a good idea, but it doesn’t work. So, don’t do it. Now, the second point that I have is to like my brother said we are training your dog to speak on command with the bark. You can train your dog to do other things to alert you besides just bark. You could set up a little bell on your front door so that you train your dog when somebody new comes into the house that he rings the bell and he gets just a fantastic reward, just as a good incentive to not bark when somebody comes up and so pick somebody like I have a friend who my dog didn’t particularly care for and caused quite a fuss when, that the dog would put up quite a fuss when he would come over and what we did is we trained him with that by taking that friend and the friend agreed to participate in some training process and having the friend walk up to the house, the dog would accidentally bump into the bell and we would then reward the dog and we would let the friend in and it is just through the same sort of ways that we have taught everything here, it is slowly progressing with a clicker training. You could train your dog to either go, run and find you and paw your foot if somebody is there or to ring a bell or to spin around in circles or to jump up in the air, I really don’t care what he does and it doesn’t matter, but it is a different way for your dog to communicate that somebody is there besides barking and it is basically just more tolerable. But those are some things that should certainly help you with that annoying barking problem and really help you overcome that.

How To Stop Your Dog’s Destructive Chewing When trying to teach your dog to stop chewing, this really isn’t going to be that complex of a behavior to try to cure. It’s usually just a phase that a dog goes through just like kids go through phases and those sorts of things. So, how you are going to set up your dog for success is try to do things that you do if just like you had a toddler around. Put up gates so he can’t get to areas where furniture is, create areas or rooms that are just his room, give him lots of toys that he really likes, which means lots of toys, every sort of, if you walk into our house our dogs don’t chew things any more, but our toys, it’s like there is this toy pile, there are 15 toys over this toy pile and the dog should play with all of them and they will play with each other, they

will pull on them, they will chew on them. There are toys for just pulling, there are toys for chewing, there are toys that are meant to be fetched. There are also different toys so that the dog especially if it’s a puppy has the opportunity when it is teething to dig into something that really excites him because it helps their gums feel better when those new teeth are coming in to chew on that sort of stuff. Also, if you have a puppy and the puppy is either nipping you or chewing on your hands or biting or whatever it may be that you don’t like simply stop doing whatever you are doing, get up and leave the room. Give him some time to kind of think about what he did and then come back and play with him and as soon as he starts nipping or biting you again, get up and leave the room because the last thing you want to do is give any kind of reinforcement. Some people will suggest to actually, in this case, yell at the dog and say no but I would strongly recommend not doing that. I do believe that that would be reinforcing the dog for a wrong behavior because it’s an exciting noise to the puppy especially. Just simply ignore it, and after he stops, then click and reward or just basically the same thing with the barking. That is a behavior that you don’t want and obviously you are not going to put this behavior on cue because you don’t really want him biting anybody under any circumstance but by simply ignoring the behavior and rewarding him for being good, this will quickly be phased out. What he is talking about is a little bit of negative reinforcement, but not negative, when I say negative reinforcement, I don’t mean like physical punishment. What I mean by negative reinforcement is immediately giving the dog a negative reward for the action so that you can decrease the amount of times that he will actually perform that behavior. So that negative reward in this case is leaving the room or instantly doing whatever the dog doesn’t like. The instant he nips, bites, chews on your fingers, whatever and if he really likes you and is a puppy that just loves everybody like most puppies do, then leaving the rooms like, oh gosh that wasn’t any fun and every time I bite his hand or her hand, she leaves the room. So I am not going to do that any more, that’s not fun and it’s a good way to start dogs from biting. It is used with all sorts of different animals with that sort of negative reward is basically what it is.

How To Stop Your Dog From Always Jumping On People

Okay so I am going to have to break form here and I know that this CD was created from a standpoint of teaching your dog how to be well behaved by never touching your dog, but I do have to break form and actually touch your dog on this next line. Stopping your dog from jumping up, obviously the dog is going to be jumping on you. So it sort of touches you right after that. But there is a couple of two different ways that we can do this that are going to work out and the first one is like say your dog greets you very excitedly when you come home from work. What I would try to do is try to find yourself a glass door in your house that maybe you have or maybe you don’t. But if you can have a glass door in your house, it is going to be helpful and come home from work, have the dog usually in a spot where he can see you coming from work like our dog does and can see us through the window. Approach the door, the dog can be all excited and then give it the sit command or the stay command so the dog, probably that you don’t want to actually stick with the sit, with the lie down or something, it is not jumping up, preferably probably to sit, get him to sit and then open the door. Now, if the dog jumps up and jumps on you real quick or goes to jump on you immediately shut the door and start over and teach your dog that no, he does not get to see you unless his butt is firmly planted on the floor throughout the entire greeting you process and continue to do that by shutting the door every time the dog gets up. Instantly he gets up, don’t let it get the chance to come to you and jump up on you because then you are just going to be stuck and I will show you a little way how to get out of that here in a second. But every day you come home from work or every day anybody comes home that the dog is excited to greet, have him to do the same process where they open the door after they have cued the dog to sit and shut the door if he gets up and if he stays sitting, perfect, give him a great scratch, pat on the head and tell him good boy and you are done and you can basically go back outside and do it again or as long as the dog is excited to see you, you can do that. In every instance that he is excited to see you throughout the day, you can perform that. Now, let’s say that you have kind of messed up and the dog has actually jumped up on you. Now this is what you can do. Don’t knee your dog in the chest or something like that. It does work, I know many people that the dogs have stopped jumping up on their owners, but it also trains the dog really not to like you because he gets hurt every time he comes near you. So, it is a little bit of a barrier that you are building for

yourself with that behavior. What I would do is do something that is just uncomfortable for the dog, the dog really doesn’t like all that much, but it is not that bad and that should be a, I guess a fail-safe or fall back. When the dog jumps up, try to catch his paws and by catching his paws, you stretch up his arms a little bit so he just feels a little awkward and a little bit off balance and in an unnatural position, not hurting him whatsoever and as soon as he’s uncomfortable some dogs will start to reach for your hands so that you will not immediately drop him. But don’t go to the point where he is ever hurting or stretching out so you tear something or whatever. Just hold him up there longer than he wants to be held up and let him realize on his own that every time I jump up on my owner, my owner does not necessarily do anything wrong, but I don’t really like it because I have to stay up here all the time and you are going to basically negatively reinforce your dog to not jump up on you, obviously take the first choice first, it ‘s a little more, you are able to fit it into your daily routine better and it is more positive reward for your dog and it is more positive interaction when you first meet your dog, but the second one does work too and it’s not a bad substitute.

Potty Training Your Dog Potty training your dog is a lot easier than most people think, especially if your dog is already trained and understanding what the clicker means. So, if you are actually skipping forward to this section on the CD, make sure you go back and refer to CD number 1 where we talk about clicker training and it is best to even go back and retrain your dog the sit command using the clicker. Just say your dog understands what a clicker means and you will know there are leaps and bounds of improvement with house training your dog. You start by just watching your dog and as soon as he starts to go inside of your house, which you most likely will end up doing, just quietly, don’t make any fuss, don’t yell at him, don’t tell him no, don’t even say words. Just go grab him. Take him outside to his whatever spot that you want him to use as his bathroom if you would like to call it that and put him back out there. Wait until he starts to go again and as soon as he goes, give your cue, whether it’s go potty or if you want to be clever and put a different term to it, whatever your cue word is, in this case we will just say go potty as soon as he starts to do it, click and reward and just make a big fuss and be excited that he did it properly. Now, it’s important that there are a bunch of different tips here. Make sure that you clean up the mess inside the house really, really thoroughly because dogs will tend to go in the same spot every time. It is important that they can’t smell their past odor and there is a bunch of products on the market that are available in your pet shops and also a tip that might work well is white vinegar mixed with

about 50:50 white vinegar and then water and spray it out over to help kind of eliminate the odor and the scent that was left originally and clean that up off your carpet and make sure too that in your dog’s bathroom outdoors or wherever you want him to go, make sure that you leave enough of a scent there like don’t always pick up after every single mess. Make sure that there is a little bit of a scent there so that it is a familiar place to them especially during the training that oh this is where I go and just like the rest of the training session, again I am going to, kind of, reiterate since I am guessing you might be jumping into the section. Make sure that when the dog goes, as he is going he gives the cue like go potty you click the clicker and reward him. You give him a treat, you pat him, you play with him, whatever your dog’s favorite reward is, make sure that you just make it a big scene and let the dog know that was a correct behavior. I would also like to add that you should be very aware of your dog’s cycles throughout the day. Obviously, puppies will go to the bathroom more often when they have just eaten, when they have got up from naps, those sorts of things and so you can set your dog out to succeed instead of fail so that you, you know that, you don’t want to catch him in the house all the time. You want to try to get him outside every time so he doesn’t fail. You want to get him so that you notice, okay, this is exactly where he always, always goes to the bathroom two minutes after every meal and so feed him, two minutes later take him outside to his spot, tell him to go potty and then he will be ready and raring to go right then and click and reward and it would just be a smoother process, so get the reward right away. Make sure you do it after naps, after all the natural times that you see your dog going to the bathroom so that you can just set him up for success and catch him that many more times throughout the day. It is probably beneficial to keep a chart, maybe, of the times where he goes to the bathroom so that you can be very aware of it and or so any pet sitter could be aware of it. So the process goes a whole lot smoother.

Curing Your Dog’s Irrational Fears Of Objects/People

It’s quite possible that your dog has a fear of something maybe like a vacuum cleaner. I have a dog that got afraid of, I guess it was like a TV tray, dinner sort of a thing that it accidentally fell over one time and it just really spooked him. So he had some fear associated with a few different objects.

So, I just want to walk you through how to quickly get your dog acclimated to something like a vacuum cleaner or just work with any object whatsoever and it is going to take me thirty seconds to spell out for you. Basically, it is just clicker training, the same thing we have gone through so far. Click the object in the room and then just bring your dog into that room with you, maybe it is best if it is confined room, not really small like a small bathroom or anything like that so that your dog will be afraid and be tucked into the corner, but a big room where your dog has the option to roam freely and isn’t going to pick the corner. Stick the vacuum at a certain distance away from the dog where you can tell he is not being affected by it and wait for your dog to look at the vacuum, click and reward, then wait for him to take a step towards the vacuum, click and reward and continue to move the object closer and closer and closer, not the object, I am sorry, but continue to coax, lure, closer and closer to the object on his own free will, not by you pulling him towards the object or not by you bringing the object closer to him, but by rewarding just with clicks and good treats with the dog that is well associated with. The click, the sound of the clicker being rewarded until he has gotten so close that he eventually is triggered to paw or touch with his nose or to just stand near the vacuum or whatever is present and you take it a step further. So, go into a bigger room and once you have got him used to the object itself is okay, then turn it on (the vacuum), take it into a big room and do the same thing where you bring the dog closer and closer and closer to the object while it is on and with the same process just getting him accustomed to becoming familiar with the vacuum cleaner and overcoming his fear through realizing that gosh no matter how closer I get, I really don’t get hurt ever and so it is okay. Now there is one thing that could happen and that is vacuum cleaner might be really, that might hurt your dog’s ears and if that is the case, you know, but at least you will be able to fear he will just not like the sound and so he will leave out of that aspect. So, maybe it is best to start with a dust-buster or something that is producing less noise. But you can just kind of play along with those sorts and methods and get your dog used to that object.

Curing Your Dog’s Dangerous Aggression If you listen to nothing else on this CD or this audio session except for this one track, it very well is worth all the money you spent on this kit, possibly even the life of your dog. It talks about what we are going to talk about right now; how to cure your dog’s aggression towards people because your dog can be put to sleep if

it bites a person and we do not want your dogs or anybody’s dog going after people. So, pay attention, if your dog does have some serious biting problems and they are very serious, then take it to a professional dog behavior consultant and not one over the phone, but one that will do an in-house session. Or you can take your dog so that he can get some professional on hand help and some very, very accurate analysis of why your dog is doing this. But if you are just trying to help and your dog is in the beginning stages, let’s kick it in the butt right away and stop the behavior. I think I mentioned earlier in this audio series that I had a friend, have a friend who used to come over and the dog would growl at him and bark very loudly and what we had to do is we took the dog on a leash and obviously the friend had to participate in this. But he never would attack the person but he would continue to bark at him and he could tell you he was not happy with his presence even when he came into the house and number one key is we realize we cannot corner the dog. We could not tie him up and, and let the dog be cornered because that’s when he would lash out. So don’t corner your dog and the next step we did was we clipped the dog and put him on a leash and when the person would come up to the door, the dog would start to go bark wild. It did this in a whole lot of occasions, whenever the postman would show up, whenever complete strangers would show up, all that sort of stuff and people would come to the door, ring the door bell, the dog would really, really flip out and this is very much the same with barking too. But I would have the dog on the leash and I would open the door and it helped that the person knew the situation. So try to, maybe talk to your postal carrier and let him stand there for the next 30 seconds, whatever it takes, but I helped the dog on the leash and I waited there for the dog to completely calm down or at least calm down a little bit so he stopped barking or stopped tugging on the leash, some form of progress and that I would click and reward him and this only works if your dog is well associated with the clicker. But overtime through repetitions you can cure this behavior by simply making your dog realize that okay if I just relax, I get this really good treat and everything is okay and overtime, you know, after hundred times, after a thousand times, whatever it takes of your dog realizing gosh, this always works out for the better and this always works out wonderfully, maybe give the person a treat to come to the door so that the stranger offers a treat to the dog so that if all strangers give a treat to your dog, how bad can strangers be, I guess coming from the point of where your dog is. So just a couple of points that you can use to cure that aggression towards those strangers.

Start with stopping the barking and then go from there and getting him to calm down and do those sorts of things. You can also work on this calming down technique so he has an idea of what calming down is if you already have a hyperactive dog. When you come home from work, maybe he does not jump up on you, but totally, is totally, totally hyper. Put him on a leash and just observe and wait for the dog to calm down by just standing there very still, wait for the dog to calm down and then click and reward for the dog calming down and then get to the point where you say calm down or you have a certain cue that you attach to that behavior when your dog gets wild so that your dog gets into a mode where he just calms down so that you can then attach that phrase to the postman, to the stranger coming to the door, whatever it takes so that you can have the dog calm down, realize this is a situation where he will get rewarded if he just settles down, everything is going to be okay and those sorts of things. So I think that should help you a lot and if you have some serious problem with dog biting or it has bitten people before, get him some professional help, in-house help so that you can seriously attack this problem.

How To Train Prolonged Stays If you have a problem of your dog begging at dinner or simply just want to train it to have its own spot that you want it to go to while you eat dinner, while you have breakfast or just when you want it to get out of your hair, you can teach it to go to its rug and this is very, very similar to the crate training and it will just take a little bit of time and a little repetition. If your dog has already been crate trained, this will be a lot easier to teach, especially if you did it using our methods. You will simply have a place that is designated for your dog. If you have a like a pillow, kind of a mattress type thing for your dog, if you want him to sleep there in your room and it is kind of in the corner, maybe you have a specific rug that you want the dog to sleep on so that it doesn’t get hair and everything all over the rest of the house or your bed or whatever. I guess for the sake of explaining this, we will say it is a little red rug and you have this rug in the room with the dog, you have the treats in hand, you have the clicker in hand and as soon as your dog accidentally looks at the rug, you click it and toss the treat. When the dog takes a step forward towards the rug, you click it and again toss the treat. Every step that the dog makes to get closer to the rug, you want to make sure that you reward that and again like with the crate training, don’t reward, stop rewarding if he backtracks. Don’t reward unless he moves forward and has

progressed to getting to the rug. The closer he gets to the rug again and he puts his foot on the rug, you click, you reward. As soon as he will stand on the rug, get him to sit down on the rug by simply giving a sit command or waiting for him to sit and then clicking and rewarding and you want to start adding your cue, which can simply be go to your rug and time this out like we do on the rest of the training and you are saying go to your rug. As he is going on you click, you reward and this is just going to be a matter of repetition and I do want to make a quick point that clicker training is not always about the animal getting the behavior right, but it is just as important for the animal to fail and not be rewarded as it is for the animal to do the right behavior and get a reward and what I mean by this is you tell the animal, your dog, you tell him to go to your rug and he goes, he lays down, he sits or whatever you want him to do, you click and reward. You tell him to do it again and he does not go. It is important that you completely ignore that and don’t try to keep pursuing him, go to your rug, go to your rug, go to your rug until he gets it. Because you want the dog to think, okay, I was used to a pattern, I am used to doing something and getting a treat and all of a sudden, I didn’t get a treat for doing what I was told, I don’t know, and let him think about the fact that it did not go to the rug and then it reinforces that much more when I do go to the rug and you click and you reward and that was a correct behavior. I also want to make sure it is very, very important that you when training your dog, you go to your rug, go into his chair, go wherever you want him to go, go to his bed, that you train this by adding distance and you train this by adding duration so that your dog will stay there for 30 seconds or a minute, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, obviously you guess that you are having a nice dinner outside, not outside but inside. Don’t want a dog under their feet begging for table scraps. You want him to be nicely tucked away, behaving themselves on their mat, in their bed whatever it is. So gradually take that training by stepping back, making the dog hold his sit, his lay down whatever it is on that mat or whatever his spot is for longer and longer periods of time until you are really literally out after 20, 30 minutes. It is the time _____ you want them to be and you can have him hold it and you can even take a break from the room, come back, you know, leave the room for five seconds, come back, leave the room for ten seconds, come back. Make sure you are going out of site so that your dog doesn’t think that he only has to hold to stay while you are there and those sorts of things, just so that your dog will hold the stay when you aren’t paying attention to him and when he can’t see you on the mat, in his bed and not _____ guess or for whatever situation.

Leash Training Your Dog Clicker training can be very, very effective in leash training your dog so that he is not always yanking on you when you are trying to take a nice walk or run, just do whatever. So he is not just constantly pulling you. So funny when I see people, being pulled by 200-pound dogs down the sidewalk and it doesn’t look like a whole lot of fun to me. But it is really not that hard to cure him. You can have that dog obeying your command. It is very natural for your dog to want to pull on the leash and it is not extremely effective to yank on the leash to get your dog to stop pulling, it just makes him want to pull harder. If you have ever tried to pull your dog towards something he did not want to go to, but to do, it pulls harder. It is like pulling the donkey. He doesn’t want to go there. You are fighting yourself when you do that and so some real quick simple tips that I thought were useful was before I get to the clicker training part, getting your dog to pay attention to where you are going. Now, in doing this, what I would do is I set out four cones. You can just put basically an imaginary square and I would walk the square and what I did is I had a big leash, 15-feet leash and I would let the dog get distracted and then I would walk, fast-pace walk in the other direction. So I gave him a little tug, not a jerk that yanked him off his feet or anything. It made him yell, but just a little nudge in the other way that let him know well, hey, my owner has gone that way and I forgot to pay attention and he is leaving me. So I am going to run over and pay attention and what ends up _____ after you do this a couple of times and the dog gets a few tugs in the direction when he was not expecting it is all of a sudden he is watching you. Now it is important not to make eye contact during this period of time with the dog. You want the dog to realize that it was his mistake for not paying attention, you don’t want to look at him and make eye contact and be very comfortable and make it think like you were punishing him by jerking chain or whatever you are doing and I am not advocating jerking a chain here, but, but I think you understand the point. Doing that so that you get the leash down shorter and shorter and shorter so that the dog is always paying attention and keeping your eyes on you and that will make it so that it is a little bit easier when are trying to corner with the dog and just maneuver that he is not always going the opposite direction and trying to go up to changing directions. That being said, to stop pulling on the leash is very simple. Have a treat, have a clicker and just go out for a walk. Have a regular decent-sized leash and I mean a decent just a 4, 5, 6-feet leash and just go out for a walk. Start walking the dog

and as soon as he starts pulling, I just want you to stop and just wait. I don’t care if you have to wait a minute, 30 seconds, 2 minutes whatever until the dog stops pulling. It’s probably only going to take a few seconds and as soon as he stops pulling at the far end of the leash, click, toss him a treat and go on. As soon as he starts pulling again, immediately stop. Don’t pay any attention or pay any eye contact to him. Don’t pet him. Don’t do whatever until he relaxes, control the leash, pet, I am sorry, click, give him a treat and go about your business and it won’t take very long for him to realize that _____ I never, I never, I can’t ever pull on this leash, otherwise I don’t get rewarded. Now, that will only go so far. You also need to reinforce good behavior, which is once again to stop pulling on a leash for one second. Now jog for two, three steps if he hasn’t started pulling on the leash, click, stop, and give him another treat. Then jog for five seconds and jog for ten seconds until you can build up your time to the dog’s running for 20, 30, 40 minutes and an hour at a time _____ you want to walk or run without pointing on the leash and then clicking and rewarding and you probably won’t really need to click and reward once you get past 15 minutes or so. The dog will have gotten the behavior down and just realizes that he is not supposed to pull and just intermittent pets confirmation, prays is all you are going to need and he is just going to be plenty happy with a new adjusted habit. But there is a pretty basic simple concept to get your dog to stop pulling on the leash, important to clicker training and some other behaviors. He knows what the clicker means before attempting this, usually like a sit, sort of a beginner command and this should be a piece of cake and your dog will stop taking you for a walk and you cannot actually walk your dog.

Final Thoughts To close up the session of audio seminar here, I want to just give you a couple of tips on the training of your dog that will lead you on to just greater success. First one, I am just going to kind of rattle off a few. Try, try changing things up. Train your dog in different clothing. Don’t always wear the same outfit when you are training him. Make sure you incorporate different distractions and different rooms, not at the beginning but just towards the more advanced phases of each step. Make sure that you have a dog walk ing by or there are neighbor kids outside playing, little things it would normally be distractions if you can still have your dog doing all of the desired behaviors with these distractions, you really are going to know it is a huge improvement and just an incredibly well-trained dog, again just different rooms have different people train your dog.

Have your brothers, your sisters, your parents, your wife, your husband whoever. Have them watch you do the training and maybe they can listen to these audio seminars with you so that they get a great grasp on exactly what you are looking for. Have them watch in on the training and then have them do some of the training too so that your dog learns to accept commands from everybody and not just you. I think that is an important thing that could come into play in a lot of different situations. A side note on that, I just would strongly recommend you to fill out a training log when you are using other people involved in the training, for example, I guess with whatever you are training, so they know how long the dog has been holding this sit, stay command or how long he has been going without barking at a stranger coming to the house. Just so everybody can participate, be on the same page with the dog’s progress so that you don’t get your dog, so he is holding it for 30 seconds and your husband comes along and thinks he is doing great. Get him the dog to hold it for 15 seconds and you are actually getting negative progress, just so everybody is on the same page and make sure too that everybody is giving the same exact cue, the same, like I was saying, I mean, just make sure that everybody is doing the same things. It is important that you are saying it in the same way, you are saying go to your rug instead of find your place or whatever kind of different term, make sure everybody is on the same page there and that the dog, just make it the best environment possible for your dog to succeed and this includes everything of that we have mentioned along with different lighting, different times of day, different just all sorts of as many different variables as you can and you will notice your dog will be much happier, healthier and overall you and everybody that surround your dog will just be happy and you will develop a much, much stronger bond with your pet and in final closing, I want to point you to one resource that you probably going to hear about via e-mail from us, maybe mail, where it may change on how we tell you about it from the time we actually get this CD produced at the time it reaches your hands, but in somewhere form, we are doing conference calls, not ourselves, but we have conference calls that actually vets do on a very weekly basis usually where you can call in and we will get those numbers to you, either in your training kit or via e-mail or however, where you can call in and get some information on pet health. It is extremely, it is an extremely misunderstood industry where just in changing your dog’s diet, you can notice big, big differences in behavior and health and how long your dog lives and it is arthritis, and it is allergies, just all those sorts of things, energy levels, all that sort of stuff. So, that is the key important ingredient that we are not going to talk about on this audio session, but that will be available to you at no cost if you just pay attention to when those seminars are so that we can plug you in and get you the hardest,

most advanced technical information and with that, I hope that you have enjoyed this audio session. I hope that it can take your dog and transform its behaviors in an incredibly short amount of time and we look forward to hearing about you and your dog’s success. Good luck.