Cooper, right, and his littermates
Cooper is 50 days old today and his training is well underway. This time around, I know how many different skills he needs to learn before getting to the fun stuff like retrieving. With a young cute dog, it’s so tempting to see what they can do, to throw bumpers and rolled up socks and to see if they’ll follow scent trails. Don’t get caught in that trap; don’t invest your ego in the athletic abilities of your dog. There’s a long list of important skills that need training right from the start. You’ve got your work cut out for you.
- Recall: At this age, your dog will almost certainly view you as the most interesting thing in the yard. Start your recall drills now and do them consistently for the next several months. Ultimately, you want the sound of the whistle to bypass the pup’s brain entirely and go right to his feet. I’ve been using tiny pinches of soft liver for treats and scraping them off into Cooper’s mouth on his upper incisor teeth. This helps keep him from nipping at my fingers. I let him explore the yard a little and then whistle him in and treat/praise/pet. You want to know, when is it OK to give your dog inordinate amounts of affection? Answer: When you’re doing recall drills. If you’ve got another person around, practice recalling him back and forth between you.
- Condition Your Bridge: The bridge or marker is the linchpin of your training. It’s an unemotional sound—a click, a one-syllable word like “good,” quickly spoken—you make at the exact moment of the desired behavior, and it’s followed immediately by a reward. The bridge is so important because it allows the dog to know what he did to earn the reward—not generally what he did, exactly what he did. But that’s only once he learns what the bridge means. The word “good” or a click is meaningless to a dog until he realizes that 1) the sound is always followed by a reward and 2) he can control when the sound is made by offering behaviors. At six weeks, there are most likely only two things your dog will view as a reward: food and physical affection. These are unconditioned rewards; your dog doesn’t need any training to know he likes them. Later, as food and pets are paired with verbal praise, the praise will gradually become a powerful reward of it’s own. This is the goal and it’s going to take time. Praise, you can throw a hundred yards into the field. Treats and pets, not so much.
- Socialization: I never understood what this meant for a dog because it broadly encompasses half a dozen things that generally add up to your dog not acting like a nuisance. Here are five things you need to train specifically, starting now. We’ll break them out specifically over the next few days.
- Housebreaking: The good news is that all dogs arrive from their mothers pre-housebroken, at least when it comes to their own dens. You just need to expand that sense of cleanliness from den (crate) to the rest of your home.
- Crate Training: If you’re properly housebreaking, you’re also crate training.
- Place Training: Dog’s gotta know his place, not just in the grand scheme of things but where he’s going to sit quietly in your house.
- Calmness and Patience: These two are probably the biggest, hardest, most abstract skills of all. Raising a calm, patient dog is the sum of many factors, that are mostly undermined by the inexperienced handler’s need to see how far a young dog can retrieve and how early he can learn field handling skills like casting. We’ll go over this more, later, but quickly, before you get yourself into trouble: Never allow your pup to call you to him by crying unless he’s confined in his crate and needs to pee. Teach him that carrying on works—it can take fewer than a handful of mistakes on your part—and you could be trying to untrain it for the rest of his life. With Cooper, I wait for him to stop yipping before approaching his puppy pen. Ditto putting his food down. I’m happy to let him manipulate me with good behavior.
- Tying Out Quietly: This is a big part of calmness and patience, but it’s more specific.
The trainers at Assistance Dogs of the West assure me that their K9 students who don’t make the cut can do all of the service dog tasks like hitting light switches and opening doors. They only wash out because they can’t be calm under demanding circumstances. Good dogs at Wildrose are judged by much the same standard: Control and temperment are king.
[...] passed along news from Tennessee-based handler Jim Bowers about Cooper’s half-brother Boone’s recent certification in arson detection. Boone is trained to [...]