Mountain View Dog Training

Can your dog read your mind?

Of course he can! You’ll probably swear to it after you’ve shaped a few behaviors, and you can tell your friends this is the case. But you’ll know the truth – that he’s offering you behaviors because he’s been reinforced repeatedly for those behaviors – and he even figured out what works (i.e., what you want. There you go, he can read your mind!).

I like to “shape behaviors” because this method is 100% hands-off and the dog gets to decide what to do – or so he thinks. This method empowers dogs to use their brains – and they do have brains – to figure out how to earn the reinforcement. It’s the most rewarding method I’ve used to train dogs, and I’m talking about rewarding to me, as well as to the dog!

To teach a dog a new behavior, a good trainer will divide the behavior into small “slices” – pieces of behavior that when put together form the final action we want the dog to perform.

For example, to sit in front of you, your dog must first lift his head up, shift weight back, slide his rear legs forward while dropping his haunches… In shaping a sit, each of those pieces would be clicked and treated multiple times. The more pieces a desired behavior is sliced into and each of those pieces reinforced, the more solidly the dog learns the final desired behavior.

Playing the following game with your dog will give you an idea of how the act of reinforcing small behaviors will lead to a dog happily learning things you never dreamed of! Read the rest of this entry »

… by Cathy Hughes

There is a lot of confusion surrounding the house training process for our dogs. This is amazing to us since humans have been faced with this task for centuries…you’d think we’d get it right by now. Perhaps the confusion starts with the name–“house training.” From the numerous calls we get it seems that owners house train dogs quite well! That is to say, many dogs wait until they are safe inside the house before relieving themselves! This is not what the owner intended… what they were shooting for is a dog that is “yard trained.” Let’s look at a few simple rules that would apply to yard training an adult dog as well as a puppy. Read the rest of this entry »

… by Averill Ring

The domestic dog’s ancestors were carnivorous beasts that hunted and killed other animals for food. The behaviors associated with these skills are “hard wired” into our dogs to some extent. Without these skills they would perish.

The fact that humans have developed, through centuries of selection, an animal that coexists with us safely and peacefully is testimonial to the adaptability of the canine organism and to the creativity and intelligence of man. We must never forget this basic prey drive of dogs; Read the rest of this entry »