Engage Dog Training

Ready to learn?

Learning to identify and manage your dogs energy level is one of the keys 🔑
to better behaviour management and creating an optimal learning environment.

While it's not easy, it's 100% worthwhile.

Does your dog have an off switch?
Or is your house parkour palace?

While we could look to teach this through a verbal cue or association to an item, I've found building an association with a particular environment to be the most effective and straightforward 🏠

Here are some tips

👉 Choose your locations. Pick easily distinguishable areas and assign low and high arousal activities respectively. The easiest way to apply this is to make outside a place for play and inside a place of calm.

👉 Set your dog up for success. Before implementing your new rules around calm behaviour inside, ensure the dog gets adequate physical activity outside.

👉 Free shape desirable behaviour. Whenever your dog chooses to relax inside reward it. This can be done with food, praise or affection. What's important is that you're rewarding calm behaviour, in a calm manner, with a calming reinforcer. Pay attention to how your dog acts after being rewarded. Rewards that elevate the dog too much can be counter-productive.

👉 Utilise a house line. Keeping a leash on the dog in the initial phase of building a calm association can be very helpful. This is our means of preventing the dog rehearsing unwanted behaviours (parkour) inside. If the dog is beginning to elevate use the leash to prevent undesirable behaviour and provide direction to a preferred behaviour. Any alternate behaviour should be incompatible with being a lunatic (a solid down stay or place command can come in handy).

👉 Be consistent. Bending the rules now might seem nice to the dog but it's mean in the long run. It's not fair to give mixed signals but later get upset at mixed results.

👉 Mind your energy. This is the hard one. Like it or not, most dogs pay very close attention to your own energy level and use it as a means of gauging whether anything exciting is going on.
Most dogs will find it very challenging to relax if you're four coffees deep trying to scrub the ceilings, giving your best rendition of Toto's Africa and trying to get 10,000 steps in.
If you struggle sitting still yourself, crate time with a frozen kong is preferable.

Engage Dog Training is very pleased to be offering Leash Services.
This is not your average dog walking.
So many people struggle with their leash walking, but it doesn't have to be this way.
We're here to help.
Click the link to get started.
https://www.engagedogtraining.com/leashservices

Welcome to the first in a series on learning theory 📚

Understanding how dogs learn can be super helpful in understanding and training your K9

If you learned something or know someone who would benefit feel free to to like and share 🐾

If you’ve accidentally taught your dog the wrong thing through CC feel free to fess up in the comments 👇

Next time we’ll cover Operant Conditioning (there’s some gems so be sure to follow along)