Puppy Training 101 – 3 Rules To Perfect Skills – Professional Dog Training Tips
– In today’s video, we’re gonna take
a little deeper dive
into Puppy Training 101,
and we’re gonna talk about
some dog training theory.
Now if you’ve seen just a couple of videos
from our McCann Dogs channel,
I think you’re ready for this.
We do a lot of how-to content,
and in this video we’re
gonna talk about the why.
The reason that’s so important is that
once you understand
the reason for teaching
a certain behavior, a certain way,
you can really cater it to your dog
and to your specific training scenario.
So in this video, we’re
gonna talk to Instructor Shannon,
who’s our Director of Online Training,
and she’s gonna spell out the three steps
that you need to be
successful with your dog,
with any kind of skill.
I’m Ken Steepe, and welcome
back to McCann Dogs.
(guitar music)
(dog barking)
We help more than 500 dog
owners every single week
here in our training facility,
to overcome the same
dog training challenges
that you have, so if
this is your first time
on our YouTube channel, make sure you hit
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so that I can help you
to have a well-behaved
four-legged family member.
Shannon, you and I often talk about
the why behind dog
training in our podcast,
and I thought it would
be a great opportunity
when I saw that piece of
content that you created,
to talk to our YouTube
audience a little bit
about the why behind their dog training.
And as I mentioned in our
opening before I came in here,
understanding the why
behind what you’re doing
with your dog really makes
you a more versatile trainer.
It also allows you to
cater what you’re doing
to your specific dog.
You talked about three
steps to being successful
with your dog, and let’s
talk about the first step.
What is the first step that our audience
needs to be aware of.
– Yeah, you bet.
The first step would
actually be teaching a skill,
so if for example I’m
teaching a sit exercise,
I need to spend some time
helping my dog understand
how to get into the sit,
what my communication methods
are to get him into the sit.
For example, if I wanted
to teach him a signal
or if I wanted to teach him a verbal,
I’m gonna have to make
sure that I spend some time
helping to have him
interpret those things,
because of course we don’t
speak the same language.
So I like to do that
in a quiet environment.
I like to make sure that there’s not a lot
of outside distractions going on
so that there’s optimal
learning taking place.
And I will spend enough time
getting repetitions of that
that I’ve got the
behavior fairly proficient
on whatever I’d like.
So whether it’s a signal
or whether it’s a verbal,
I’ll make sure that I solidify that
in that quiet environment before I start
adding anything in.
– And what is step two in
the general training theory?
– Yeah, well I would say
that the second thing
that you need to be very very aware of
is management of the cue while you’re
still in the teaching mode.
So chances are I’m not gonna be able
to teach a finished
product in one session.
You know, it would be very few skills
or it would be a very
very well-learned dog
that would be able to complete
a skill in one session.
So presuming that we’re
talking about puppies,
if I’m teaching the sit,
I don’t wanna contradict that.
So I don’t wanna now take
my dog into environments
and start asking for the sit
or start assuming that he’s going to know.
There’s a certain amount of management
that needs to come into play,
so that I can create a skill that is
really really solid from that first step.
So management is what I’m gonna do
to make sure that my
dog doesn’t get it wrong
while he’s still in the teaching phase.
– Yeah.
– So I need to make sure that if I am
in a new environment, for example,
and my dog is looking
to me for information,
that I give him good clear information,
and that means probably taking a step back
to the beginning of my training set,
and in this new environment now starting
with that first stage
that I would get through.
– To avoid the risk of
getting too abstract,
let’s talk about some
specifics for management.
You know, fixing problem behaviors
or teaching your puppy to be right.
What are some specifics for management?
– Yeah, you bet.
So great management tools
are leashes, crates,
you know, all the things that allow you
to keep the puppy from
making the wrong decisions
in the interim.
So for example if I’m
house training my puppy
and now I need to go and have a shower,
I’m not gonna leave my
puppy loose in the house
and just hope he doesn’t have an accident.
Chances are, he might make a mistake,
so I’m gonna put him in a crate
and use that as a management tool,
so that while I’m in the teaching phase
of house training, I’m not having my dog
rehearse having accidents in the house.
– For sure, and a couple other examples
that I think of, I know
we get a lot of questions
on the channel about our using
things like a House Line,
being able to manage your dog
if they get wild and excited,
or if they grab something or they’re
jumping up and nipping, whatever it is,
having that management
tool of a House Line.
And also, eliminating their opportunity
to do something like that, to jump up,
because you’re proactively training them.
You’re working on some of those skills.
I also, just struck me thinking about
walking on a loose leash.
It’s something that you and I talked about
earlier today, but when
you’re in the teaching phase,
you’re in a very quiet area.
You’re managing the
environment as much as you can
to allow your dog to be successful
and you’re not spending
five minutes on training
and then 25 minutes allowing
your dog to pull on leash.
– Exactly, we don’t wanna
end up in a scenario
where our dogs learn the exact opposite
of what we want them to learn,
because we’re not in the teaching stage,
or we’re not in training mode, let’s say.
So as an example, you were
using walking on leads.
I would avoid taking my dog
for just general long walks
while I was doing the teaching phase
of walking on leash, because I know
that I can maybe walk around the block
or just stay on my street
in front of my house,
back and forth in front of my house,
and I can get in the perfect
training that I need,
rather than trying to take my dog
for a big long walk and having him pull me
the entire way, and then rehearsing
exactly what I don’t want him to do.
– Yeah, and we talk about dogs will do
what’s rewarding, and I
know we’ve mentioned that
on the channel, a fair amount.
If we eliminate their opportunity to be
self-rewarded by jumping up
on the counter, for example.
That’s a real good one, managing your dog
so that they don’t have the opportunity
to reward themselves.
Leading up to that, you’d
be training your dog
to sit nicely when you’re
beside the countertop,
with maybe something delicious on there.
But after that, you need
to really manage them
and make sure that they
can’t reward themselves
whenever they want to, because then
you have a much greater challenge at hand.
– Exactly, absolutely,
and dogs being dogs,
curious, inquisitive, they’re going to
investigate the environment.
They’re gonna make mistakes,
so what we need to do
until they understand
the rules of the house is we need
to manage them so they
can’t make those mistakes,
and they can’t get reinforced
for making the wrong choices.
– For sure.
The last step in this flow,
in the three steps to successful training,
is maybe the one that’s the most rushed,
the most overlooked, and it’s something
that I think our viewers at home
really need to take seriously
when they’re teaching their dog to
have a reliable recall,
come when they’re called,
to have a reliable response to name.
What is that third step
that is so crucial?
And it’s a very fluid process.
– It really is, and this is
usually the big disconnect,
when somebody says, my dog’s not doing
what he’s supposed to be doing,
but he does it at home.
– Right.
– You know, we hear that a lot.
He does it at home, and
people are frustrated
because their dogs do
these great things at home,
and not, maybe not here in class one day.
And it’s because the dogs need proofing.
They need, they don’t
generalize like we do,
so we can,
you know, I can get into a
Honda Civic and drive it,
and then get into a Ford
Escape and drive it.
We can generalize well, but
dogs are different than us.
They will go into a new environment,
and it’s a completely
new scenario for them.
So we need to make sure
that we expose them
to all sorts of distractions,
whether it’s environmental,
whether it is, it’s distractions of food
or other dogs or just a new location
that you’re working in.
Proofing through is the step that’s
gonna take much more time, usually,
than the actual training itself,
and it’s so much more important.
So if you find yourself
saying, why is my dog
not doing this here, he does it at home,
it’s probably because you haven’t
taken enough time to help them generalize,
to proof through, to acclimate them
to different distractions,
and to make sure
that my dog can sit in
the kitchen at home.
When I go out on the
road, I wanna make sure
that my dog can also sit there,
but I need to be fair and I need to
give him enough repetition
and enough exposure
to different distractions, et cetera,
in the environment that he is going
to be able to perform it,
and ignore the bikes, and
ignore the other dogs,
and you know, just give you full attention
and absolutely give you what you want.
– For sure, and I’m thinking about this
from our new puppy owners,
or maybe you’re about to get a puppy.
I mean you can apply this idea.
Yeah, it’s a
pretty amazing process.
– Get the puppy (laughs).
You can apply these ideas to the sit.
You can apply these ideas
to walking on a loose leash
as we’ve talked about a lot.
Maybe you’ve got an adolescent dog,
and you feel like you’ve
got a nuisance behavior,
and you’ve come to YouTube
looking for an answer.
I mean, whatever it is, you can take these
chunks of information,
training, management,
and then proofing, and apply it
to whatever you’re working on at home.
Now for proofing, you
talked about distractions,
and the three, we talked
about the three D’s
when it comes to proofing
some of these behaviors.
And maybe explain to our
viewers really quickly
the three D’s when it comes to proofing
these skills with your dog.
– You bet, and these are a big deal.
So it’s gonna be distance,
duration and distraction.
So with distance, we wanna make sure that
for things like stays, I’m not going from
a foot out in front to
20 feet out in front
all at once.
Duration, I need to make sure that
I’m not asking my dog for
longer than he is capable
of giving me, and then
adding in everything
and using those distractions to not only
help my dog understand that
listening to me is preferable,
but also to help him become
confident in those skills,
to help him understand
how to sit, for example,
when there’s another dog in the vicinity
that he’s interested in saying hello to,
for example, or a bike driving by
that he might wanna chase.
I need to make sure that that exposure
is what I spend a lot
of my training time on,
so that he has no problem understanding
what I’m asking for.
– Now I wanna thank Instructor Shannon
for joining us here today,
and if you’d like to work
with Instructor Shannon,
our Director of Online Training,
in our free monthly workshop,
check out the link in
the description below.
And if this is your first
time on the channel,
make sure you hit that Subscribe button.
We publish new videos every single week
to help you to have a well-behaved
four-legged family member.
On that note, I am Ken.
– I’m Shannon.
– Happy training, bye for now.
– Bye, everybody.
