This week, Tony explains what separates Pro Trainers from the average dog owner, and the ways in which we can learn from them to be better at working with your dogs.
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Hey, everyone, Welcome to the Foundation's podcast. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about the little things we can all do to be better at training our dogs. Now. I know, I know you don't think of yourself as a dog trainer, right is it because you don't get paid to mold wild puffs into something manageable or maybe take a well bred dog to the level in which it can compete in field trials or hunt tests and maybe win. Look, the truth is, if you own a dog, you are a dog trainer, and with that comes to the responsibility of trying to do things the right way, which is what this episode is all about. A few weeks ago, I dropped a podcast about how to find training opportunities wherever, and about how to look at many of our little interactions with our dogs as tiny windows in which we can mold our four legged besties into something a little better. In that episode, I talked about how one of my daughters trained our four year old lab to yon on command. I mentioned that it was sort of a no harm fun thing to get Sadie to do. Well. I'm here to tell you now that you should not train your dog to yon on command, or at the very least, not treat train a four year old Labrador Retriever to yon on command. Now that frickin' dog begs more than any dog I've ever had, and while she is begging like a seventeenth century popper who hasn't eaten for days, she will obsessively snap her jaws together in a half ass attempt to yon. I'm sure a lot of pro trainers listen to these shows, and many of them probably slap their foreheads so hard at that that you might be able to listen closely and hear their collective palms whacking into their skulls. It probably spoot flocks of songbirds and cause wintering deer to raise their heads in alarm. My wife and daughters think it's hilarious, like honestly the funniest thing they've ever seen, because it bothers me so much. Now I have to unwind that not which is the tax I pay for not having the foresight to see that obvious result barreling toward me when my daughter decided this was her new mission with my bird dog. Seeing into the future is what good dog trainers do, and it's what you and I should do to be better at dog training. If you think that's me being facetious, I'm not. I've had the good fortune to hunt and train with a handful of amazing professional trainers, and they can all see into the future when it comes to dog behavior. This is because dogs are generally predictable, even if we focus solely on their individual traits. The differences between us and pros are many, but the truth is that when people get their hands on enough dogs, they start to understand all dogs, and honestly, all of us idiots who do things like train our dogs yawn. They see actual problems or the first whispers, the first hints of problems, and they know where those are going to lead. They work to head them off, and that is a billion times better than having to diagnose problems in dogs that were put there by the owners and then untangle the mess before they can really usher the dog in the right direction. In this way, pro trainers are a lot like veterinarians. They get into their field because they want to work with dogs, but a huge amount of their mental and physical resources go toward managing the people who own the dogs, which is you and I. But we can take away lessons from the pros and from our dogs themselves, so that we can level up how we deal with our dogs. The best way to start this is to think about the type of dog you have, and to think about your dog specifically. Let's say you have a German short hair pointer. You know their traits as a breed. They're often high energy, high drive bird hunting machine. They love love and will gladly take as much as you will give, but not while there are birds to be pointed. When the big show is on, they are often engaged with that world. But when it's time to snuggle up on the couch, it's a different story. There's a lot there to work with. But what about your individual dog. Is your GSP a big softy where if you raise your voice even slightly she might pee on the floor. Maybe you have a barrel chested mail that signals not so subtly that he would take the alpha roll from you if you gave him half a chance. There's a lot to work with there too. Understanding what makes your dog really tick is important for the big training goals. It's one of the reasons that people both love Labrador Retrievers and also shit on them for being so common and predictable. I ran into this quite a bit recently while attending the Southeastern Wildife Expo down in Charleston, South Carolina. While there were way more labs there than I expected, there were also so many dogs, so many different It was pretty incredible really, But as you can imagine hanging around that crowd, especially when the drinks were really flowing, that resulted in a lot of shit talking about different dog breeds, and the labs a prime target for many folks. Maybe I'm a touch too close to the subject, but it's wild to me to look down on a breed because it's too eager to please. I mean, shouldn't most folks go with a breed that is highly trainable. How often do we buy a product that is more difficult to use than a comparable product that is intuitive and easy. Not very often. But dog breed loyalty often comes with the caveat that our choices are mostly about us and how we want to identify in the community, then being honest about what would really work well for us dogwise. But I digress, because even those blockheaded labs that draw the ira of folks whose dogs have beers or docktails, they can be a real pain and they ask to train too. All dogs can, and most of it isn't because the dog is a pain in the ass to train. It's because we don't know what to do with that dog. So let's start with a big one. You want to help your dog level up on some skill anything really, steadiness, recall, healing, whatever. Do you know what pro trainers often have that most amateurs don't, besides a better equipped toolbox overall patience? Scratch that, patience and confidence. You know both of those things walk in lockstep, honestly, But you won't be a confident dog trainer until you learn to be a patient dog trainer. Think about it this way. If you go get a puppy this spring and you bring home that little pupsterra at eight weeks, you're going to have to put in a couple of years of real, dedicated training to make that dog something special. And it's not like when the dog turns three the training suddenly stops. But when you're sitting at home, drinking a cup of purple Slizzer and thinking about getting a puppy, it's pretty easy to be dismissive of a two year time frame. But two years is a long long time. It's also an investment into something pretty special, and you really don't have much of a choice if you want an awesome dog. Sure, you can offshore some of the training duties to a pro in exchange for cold hard cashish, but that doesn't relieve you of your day to day responsibilities with your dog. You still have to do your part. Maybe the easiest way to learn to be patient is to think about the moments that you are impatient with your dog. I can think of a couple in my life with Sadie, and I'm not super proud of them, but I'll tell you anyways, because maybe you can learn something from my dumb assery. A big one that brings me great shame is something I've talked about on here before, which was the maddening time I had trying to get Sadie to swim. I'd never met a lab that wouldn't take to water, so I was ill equipped to deal with that task. It would be kind of like, I don't know if my next wife just bought a microwave when ours broke, and instead of nominating me to suddenly be a skilled microwave repair guy, and then looking down on me when I couldn't fix a broken fricking microwave and we had to go buy a new one. Anyway, I lost my patience with Sadie more than once because I didn't like the thought of my duck dog being terrified of water. That's really a bad combo in my unprofessional opinion. I tried everything I could think of, and it got to me bad. But it took one five minute phone call with Tom doc And to set the whole thing straight and fix a problem that I thought might never get fixed. The issue there was that my impatience stemmed from my ego and it bled into our water introduction sessions because they didn't go the way I wanted from the jump. I wanted Sadie to follow my schedule, but she wasn't built for it. It was dumb. It was also dumb when I lost my cool while pheasant hunting with her two seasons ago. After I most retired the old dog, I thought we had the hunt dead thing down, but that was because the old dog was doing most of the recovery missions on the roosters when they hit the cat tails. But without that crutch, it became clear that my young dog wasn't as sharp as I thought. It took a dedicated effort in the off season and a much different approach this season to help her truly level up on that part. And boy is that part important. Was it her fault? Absolutely not. Was it fair that I lost my patience with her out here, you know, in the arctic slews where the roosters live. It was not. If there is a lesson there for all dog owners, there is absolutely patients, And those two instances where I lost my cool, they were my fault, not hers. She didn't know what to do, at least not fully, and she had issues of her own. Instead of figuring out a way to help her work through them slowly, methodically and in a way that would foster lifelong confidence, I put her in situations where she was bound to fail. This happens a lot when we move our dogs too quickly through various stages of training. You might get some positives out of their performance, but they might be false positives that could disappear on any given day or with one new distraction, or because going from a controlled spot like your backyard to a wonderland of new sense and excitement like the grouse woods is bound to unravel a bit of your dog's composure. There is a balance between asking too much of a dog and not asking enough. You are very unlikely to meet too many dogs in your life that have been generally overtrained. The opposite is far more likely. This is an issue many of us have where we just don't ask enough of our dogs. If you go out and get a sporting dog, you are saying that I'm getting a dog that needs a job, or lots of jobs. They thrive on tasks they have twenty or twenty five centuries or working with us on tasks. It's literally coded in their DNA. And if you think you can escape that, you can't. Neither can they. We are the same way, but given the chance to be lazy, we will often choose it. So will they, especially if they have no choice but to lay around and be lazy. A working dog needs to work, and when they don't, they won't be as good at working or in this case learning. Even though I don't shed hunt much with my dogs, I train all of them to shed hunt for this very reason. When the dogs don't get enough exercise outside for whatever reason, or we are just in a winter funk where it's eighteen below, which is what it was not that long ago. Here in this frozen wasteland where I live, the girls and I will set up a find the bone game for the dogs in the house. We will make them stay. Sometimes one of the girls will cover their eyes and ears so they can't cheat, and then we'll hide antlers in the house. The dogs absolutely love it. I suppose I could try that with rooster carcasses or something, but I'm guessing my bride would have some unfavorable opinions on that. It's really kind of like practicing anything. If you want to play guitar, you're never going to get anywhere if you only pick up your six string like once a week. It's just not enough. We need to condition ourselves to tasks and then work on them until they become muscle memory and we are in the space where we can stack extra skills on top of the base. Dogs are the same way. They have simple but important needs, and training is actually one of them. They won't train if we don't ask them, because they don't have a choice. But when we do that, we are denying them not only what they need, but any chance to be easily trainable. In the future should we suddenly realize that we want some type of behavior out of them. And this is also a key component in getting a dog to work for you and bond to you. And I know your dog loves you because duh, that's what they do. But if you want the dog to really want to work for you, and I think you do, then you have to lean into what they need and figure out how to ask them the right questions over and over and over again so that they can keep building skills while having their needs met. It's honestly win win if you look at it this way. But that's not the only thing you have to do to be a better trainer. Just like going from clumsily trying to play Happy Birthday on the acoustic to putting on a show in front of a couple thousand fans, you have to have discipline with dog training. I know people hate that word, but the good news is that it's not that big of a commitment overall. You don't have to take your dog out to the park to run super advanced drills for four hours every day to become a better trainer. It's a pretty minimal investment mostly, but it's not some thing that can be super inconsistent. Just like if you want to lose weight through diet alone, you don't get to eat clean just on Tuesdays and Thursdays, while the rest of the week you gobble up gummy nerd clusters and chug mountain doo. Non stop. Dog training is an exercise in consistency if it's nothing else, And consistency means you have to look at your life and then figure out where the moments are to train. You gotta be disciplined with that. Now, maybe you've gotten in the habit of taking the dogs for a walk after work. That's great, But can you bring along a bumper or two and do some training in between letting them sniff around and piss on all the fence posts? Do you have a time window before work to stand in the yard and do ten minutes of placeboard training? How many days in a row do you think you need to do that before your dog is really good at getting to its place and waiting for your next command. Hell, you can work on that one in the house if you need to. The thing is it just has to be built into your life. It has to be a part of your life so that not only will your your dog get better at the behaviors you want out of them, but you'll also get better at training them. The more time you spend, even if it's not much time on any given day, the more you'll be able to read your dog, and you'll develop an amazing working relationship. You condition your dog to look to you for guidance while you give it what it needs, and in turn, you learn to read your dog in a way that most owners won't even understand. This ability to instantly recognize their body language, or just to quickly understand when something is wrong, or they are just primed to learn, and so you might be able to level up a lesson. It's all huge. It's the secret that most pro trainers have over dog owners in general, but one that you can foster more specifically with your individual dog, because no one has the opportunity to work with your dog more than you. The strategy not only allows you to ask more of your dog, which is good for you and them, but it will keep you learning about training tools and the value of working in new locations and just getting better at your part of this relationship. In return, you'll get a dog that grows more confident by the day and is one that is literally primed to learn more commands and more difficult tasks, and it's going to be better behave today than it was yesterday. Every one of us wants that, but we often don't really understand how to get there. It's one of those things that's, you know, actually pretty easy to understand, but take some real work to make it a part of your daily life, which is just discipline in general. Once you do, though, you'll unlock a world of dog ownership that is freaking awesome, and not coincidentally, you'll have a better dog and be a better trainer for it. So think about that and think about coming back in two weeks, because I'm going to talk a little bit about what I touched on here about dogs getting a little bit lazy and how we can anticipate that and what we can do to keep our dogs honest and learning even when they have the opportunity to phone it in. That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson and this has been The Houndation's podcast. As always, thank you so much for listening and for all your support, Cal and I really appreciate it. Hell, everybody here at Meat Eater truly appreciates it. Without you, guys and your loyalty, we wouldn't have anything, so truly thank you for that. If you need some more dog content, maybe you want some white tail content, maybe a recipe to cook up some roosters or something, or you just want to kill some time, listen to some podcasts, watch a hunting video or two. Go to themeadeater dot com check out all the stuff. We put up new content literally every day, and there's so much good stuff up there. Go check it out.