Do you have a good foundation in dog training?
Is your foundation in puppy or dog training GOOD? Or should I put it, we should all have ROCK SOLID foundation!
Let's look at what foundation is in OXFORD Dictionary. FOUNDATION is an underlying basis or principle. synonyms:basis, starting point, base, point of departure, beginning, premise;
How long do you think dog training should be part of your dog's life? Only during Dog Obedience Training Classes? Or it is a continuous journey to train, sharpen the responses and build an infallible Canine and Man relationship?
I like the analogy of equating Dog Training to Sport. The reality of training are skills are easily acquired. But to real good at it, you need to put in hundreds and thousands of hours into training.
IE Once you've properly train a dog, he is considered trained. However to be able to call upon those behaviours, it will depend on practice.
As the old saying goes ; Practise makes Perfect! How true is this? Practice makes perfect, but the role of repetitions in skill learning is not yet fully understood. For example, given a similar number of trials on a given task, it is debated whether repeating and non-repeating items are learned by the same neural process.
Just like even if you already know how to play golf, without practise, your actual on-field performance will deteriorate overtime. The only way to overcome your lapses is to PRACTISE, PRACTISE and still PRACTISE
In my opinion, these THREE Behaviours are critical and necessary in our dog training repiteiro of skill.
1. Name of the dog,
2. Good Recall, and
3. Attention.
The duration of training is dependent on the individual dogs and the skills you are training to acquire. I always look at Obedience Training as a process. In a usual Dog Obedience Class, I usually regarded it as a time to acquire new skills, getting your dog to offer the behaviours and eventually putting a cue on this command to demand it when require.
Most Dog Obedience Classes are usually conducted in once a week, this is to allow the sufficient opportunities for you and your dog to practise and internalise the skills. Do we expect to train our dog an hour a day? No. If you can commit to 10-15 minutes a day training routine, I'm sure you will have good enough exposures with your dog and the necessary exercises.
In conclusion, if you don't practise on the Name Calling, Max is unlikely to response to his name. Without attention training, he is unlikely to have you in mind, let alone wanting to seek out to know where you are at all times. And not practising good responsive recall, your recall on Max will be slow, non responsive and sometime not responding at all.
If you spend 10 minutes a day, you will clock more than an hour of training a week. And if you multiply by 365 days, you will have clock 25,550 minutes of training; you would have clock 425.8 hours of training in a year.
With so many hours of training and loads of reinforcements, you will have GREAT ATTENTION from Max and you can call on any skills at anytime and on demand basis.
Have fun and stay positive.
