March Madness: Distractions!

Welcome to March!  I don't know about you, but I'm ready for nice weather!  And with nice weather, comes increased distractions which often leads to madness especially if you have an adolescent or young dog!  I'm going to start out the month talking about different types of distractions and how they impact our dog's behavior.  Environmental distractions have a huge impact on behaviors and focus so I will spend some time specifically on different environments.  Lastly, I'll be talking about impulse control, focus, and helping your dog learn to process the environment around distractions.  We will be learning to apply what we learned in January about planning & what we learned in February about emotions to what we can do now to help our dogs become the best teammate they can be.  Watch this short March Madness Intro with co-trainer, Cindy Campbell Dog Training as we discuss distractions!

 

And be sure to subscribe to this blog in the right hand column so you won't miss out on the Focus Around Distractions Mini-Workshop taking place March 21st through 24th.  Cindy will again be co-hosting the FAD Mini-Workshop with me as part of our initiative to keep dog training real for all dog owners!

February Finale

 

I hope you all enjoyed the February Theme: Focus on Behaviors.  The information provided, was probably not what you anticipated but I do hope you enjoyed it.  As a Trainer, I hear comments all the time about "How do I get my dog to stop doing.....?"  It can be frustrating because most often the owner has not even considered WHY that behavior is happening in the first place.  I hope the information on emotions, enrichment activities, and reinforcing methods as helped you to look at the bigger picture of why your dog is doing what they are doing.  With a teamwork approach to dog training, we all need to work together to take care of all team members, the people & the dogs.

I wanted to end on "light at the end of the tunnel" note, with a point that everyone makes mistakes!  Using positive reinforcement training is challenging for most people because there are so many layers to getting it right.  I have a weekly conversation with other trainers covering a wide variety of topics that effect us in our own personal dog training.  The people who participate in the conversation, may or may not be professional trainers but have trained their own dogs to an advanced level of some type of Working Dog.  This week's topic was Reinforcement Mistakes!  So watch this conversation to learn about some common mistakes and some of our best tips and tricks for preventing mistakes.

If you'd like to more information about the Working Paws: Trainer Talk that takes place weekly, you can join my free Facebook Group:  Working Paws.  All the conversations will be placed in YouTube for you to view any time you want.  You can check out the other episodes in this playlist.

February Focus on Behaviors Bonus!

Well, it hasn't officially ended, but it's upon us.  I've decided to do the very last post on avoiding unconscious or self reinforcing of the wrong behaviors, in a video based format.  However, I won't be able to record the video in Tuesday evening, so it won't get posted here until Wednesday morning!  This means I'll be wrapping up my February Theme just a bit late.

In the meantime, I want to let you in on one of my best kept secret new resources!  Every Tuesday night, I'm partnering with Cindy Campbell Dog Training to host a Working Paws: Trainer Talk which is open to trainers of all levels.  It doesn't matter if you're training your first dog or have had dogs for years, you're invited to join in the conversations on Tuesday nights or watch the recap on my YouTube Channel!

Trainer Talk 1: Do Words Matter?

Trainer Talk 2: Cooperative Care

And Trainer Talk 3 will be on March 1st and go over Reinforcement Mistakes!  That will be posted to in this blog and linked to end the February Theme: Focus on Behaviors page.  All the resources from the month of February will remain available for you to review any time with easy access from the right column.

And I want to leave you with one more bonus video from Susan Garrett: Dogs That Episode # 42

"Behavior Chains: Are You Teaching Your Dog to be Bad to be Good?"

I hope you've enjoyed the February Theme: Focus on Behaviors!  If you have, please leave me a comment telling me what you enjoyed most.