In this program we cover basic indirect and direct relationship interactions that lead to a clear leadership relationship.
On some rare occasions, some people and their dogs have already achieved this competency and we’ll jump right into the “Core Obedience” program. That will be determined at lesson one by Sean.
The first lesson is an hour and fifteen minutes and lessons two and three are one hour.
Sean teaches a relationship-based method that doesn’t rely on food as a primary training tool. The method of training relies on social cues, reading your dog’s body language, and social reward in training. The method relies on accurate positive reinforcement of what we do want and guidance, direction and correction with a leash following Sean’s “minimum threshold of effective communication” principle.
With some dogs, particularly dogs that have not had the advantage of any puppy training or socialization, may need remedial “puppy-like” introductions to the most basic of exercises. When this is required, we will revert to our puppy training methodology that relies more heavily on food during introduction stages.
In this entry level course, we will use a regular 6-foot leash, and some form of training collar. The type of collar will depend on the personality, breed and temperament of each dog, as well as the communications necessities of each person-dog combination.
The different collars we use are listed below:
In short, yes. It is, however, important to understand what a correction is and why it is used in all functional dog training. We use a balanced approach that includes, positive and negative feedback.
Methods of training that ideologically reject the idea of correcting a dog are known as “purely positive” methods of training. I was originally trained in a “purely positive” method of dog training many years ago. I saw a few dogs take to it and I saw that method fail a lot of dogs as well. Fortunately, for me, I was also working at shelters taking dogs out in small groups to exercise, socialize and train them before and after hours to help improve their adoptability. While there weren’t fights during the group play but I did notice that those dogs used balanced positive and negative feedback with each other all the time. They used forms of positive communication to essentially say, “that was great, let’s play chase again”, or they used negative feedback to communicate messages like, “don’t mount me” or “don’t nip me or jump up on me like that”. So, that’s when the “lightbulb” went off for me about dog behavior. The strange thought in my head was, “I guess dogs never read the ‘purely positive’ dog communication book? … because that’s not how they do it.”