Archives : 2009 : September

Review Of Chet Womach's Emotion Training Program

If you’d like to see how Emotion Training can work miracles on your dog, click here to learn more.

>>>Click  Here To Enroll In Chet’s Emotion Training Program<<<

Stop Dog Barking: Training Your Dog To Be Quiet On Cue

Finally there is a proven way to stop dog barking without having to resort to the old school training methods of punishing your dog, using shock collars or other negative methods.

In this blog post I decided to share with you an answer to one of my clients frustrations about not being able to stop her dog’s barking.

I think you’ll love the suggestions I gave her, and will find them extremely effective ways to stop dog barking once and for all!

Enjoy!

*** Question From A Reader ***

Hi Chet,

I was wondering if you are able to help I have asked my vet about this. Every Friday morning around 5am garbage trucks come by. One is for normal rubbish and one is recycling. I sometimes wake up before they get close to our home. But when the truck is within two or three houses Snoopy starts to bark constantly and I have tried to get him to be quite but he will not listen. The only way I can stop him barking is by holding him by the collar and lightly holding his mouth closed. Otherwise he constantly barks. I received Snoopy Border Collie x Blue Cattle at nine months. And he is now seven. It has been a lot of garbage trucks. I am not sure whether it is a habit he has gotten into or something is aggravating him. If it is habit how to I break it. I love him dearly I would like to be able to solve this problem for me and the neighbors. I hope you can suggest some ideas to help this situation. Your assistance would be greatly appreciated as I have no idea how to tackle this situation. I have had a look at the barking video which had great ideas but I am not sure how to apply it to this situation.

Yours sincerely

Anne Sinclair

>>> My Comments:

Anne, there are several reasons why a dog barks.  He could be afraid, he could be territorial, bored, just be letting you know about something new, or he could be excited… and on and on.

Most of the time it’s a combination of your dog being a bit of an Emotional Wussie, along with continually trying to always use, force, restraint or negative controlling types of intervention… and never really seeing results.

Let’s first talk about the Emotional Wussie part

Helping dogs be more resilient Emotionally is what my Emotion Training program is all about.  It’s really best described as an 8 week Emotional Conditioning program that would be a lot like you or I doing an 8 week exercise or conditioning program.

In a traditional conditioning program that you or I would take part in, we’d go into a see a personal trainer, they’d test us to see how much stress or resistance our bodies could handle without breaking down…

Then they customize a conditioning program that’s designed to put low levels of stress on our bodies to help them build up their ability to handle more and more weight.

Well your dog’s Emotions work the same way.

In truth, every living creatures emotions work the same way.

If a human is afraid of public speaking, and they want to become more Emotionally Conditioned to handle the stress of speaking in front of others, it’s a good idea to start by speaking in front of just one other person, then a small group of close friends in a speaking class, then to strangers, etc.

You don’t just throw that scared public speaker in front of 100,000 people with no build up.

They can’t handle it Emotionally.

Their Emotions haven’t been built up to the point where they can remain calm in that kind of a situation.

So that’s what my Emotion Training program does for dogs.

It strategically puts them in low emotional stress situations so they can gradually build up their “Emotional Muscles” to the point where a dog that normally would run in fear if another dog approached him, could calmly walk by a violently barking dog and remain calm.

It’s a program that I REALLY think all dog owners need to take their dogs through, and I’m VERY proud of it, it’s definitely my best work yet.

You can learn about my Emotion Training program here”

http://thedogtrainingsecret.com/dreamdog

So that’s the first part you’ve got to get straightened out if you want to stop your dogs barking.  You have to get your dog to a place where he’s not an Emotional Wussie, before you use a few advanced training strategies that I’ll share.

One of these strategies I learned from Karon Pryor, an excellent trainer, and pioneer of positive reinforcement training in animals… where she teaches how to put being quiet on cue.

To do this she recommends that you do two things.

1) You first put barking on cue

2) You then put “Stop Barking” on cue

You may first think it’s a bit odd to put a behavior that you DON’T want on cue; but here’s why you might want to consider it.

In Karen’s book, Don’t Shoot The Dog, Karen talks about when she used to do a lot of work training dolphins.

One dolphin in particular had an annoying habit of sinking to the bottom of the pool when it didn’t want to train anymore.

I’m sure you can imagine that a dolphin sitting at the bottom of a pool is a hard thing to work with… so what they discovered is that if they started to reward the behavior of sinking to the bottom of the pool, and actually put it on cue…

They noticed that the dolphin no longer sank to the bottom of the pool *unless* it was cued to do so.

Isn’t that interesting?

This putting a *bad* behavior on cue has had the same effect in tons of other training examples, like barking dogs.

Many dogs who are taught to bark on cue STOP barking unless cued to do so.

>NOTE: It’s not a 100% thing, and works best if the dog is not an emotional wussie.

If you want to know how to put a behavior like this on cue, you can see how to do that in my Hands Off Dog training program here:

http://thedogtrainingsecret.com

But here’s the clever twist…

If you think about it, the BEST way to train an animal to do something is *reward* it after it’s done a behavior that you want to do.

And since we’ve just trained a dog to DO something we don’t want him to do, we now simply ask our dog to bark, then…

Suddenly throw your hand in his face saying stop — No need to yell though

This sudden movement will catch your dog off guard and stop his barking.

Immediately click the clicker and toss him a treat… because he just stopped barking when you asked him to.

The real power and genius of this drill is that it trains your dog to bark when he’s NOT in an emotionally irritated state… so he’s more likely to stop barking because he’s not busy barking at some intruder who’s ventured onto your front lawn.

It’s allowing him to build up to that point!

You can then repeat this over and over, asking your dog to stop barking, then bark, then stop again, each time asking for quiet longer and longer, until the behavior is fully learned!

It’s a SUPER clever strategy that is *super* effective at stopping barking.

>REMEMBER: You still need to keep your dog’s emotional state of mind, in mind.  If your dog’s barking all the time because he’s bored in your backyard this strategy isn’t going to work well and requires other techniques like I talk about in my Hands Off Dog training program, here:

http://thedogtrainingsecret.com

Don’t forget that every great technique can only be great when used in the optimal situation, and you really need to asses your dogs motivation for barking before you can come up with a plan to help break him of this bad and annoying habit.

Hopefully that helps!

-Chet

P.S. If you tried this technique and it worked for you, tell me about it, I’d love to share your success with other readers to help motivate them to want to fix their dog’s problems too!

Just send your story to info@thedogtrainingsecret.com and I’ll include it in a future newsletter.

Puppy Nipping: How To REALLY Stop It

If your looking for one of the best strategies for how to stop puppy nipping quickly… without having to resort to hitting, yelling or getting all bent out of shape towards your dog, read this question that I’ve answered from one of my dog training clients:

*** Question From A Client ***

Hi Chet,

I recently purchased your dog training videos online.  I am working through them but I am having quite a difficult time with bite inhibition on hands, clothes, legs you get the idea. I am not sure if I expect too much or am doing something incorrect.  My puppy is an 11 week old Chocolate lab. If you have any pointers I would really appreciate them.

Thank you,

Nadine Cressman

>>> My Comments:

I’ve got two comments for you Nadine,

First off, you should find it helpful to realize that all puppies nip, and it’s normal.

And it’s helpful to realize that just like a human babies needs to chew on things when they’re cutting their first teeth, a puppy has the same needs.

This means that your puppy finds it extremely rewarding to chew, so getting rid of your dogs desire to chew is probably not going to happen.

Instead we want to try to direct your dog to chew things that we think are OK to chew on, which means you’re REALLY going to want to stock up on a variety of dog toys from Kongs, to hard rubber chew toys, balls etc.

Get your dog as many chew toys as possible, the first step to fixing nipping is making sure he has toys to chew on.

The second thing you’ll find it helpful to know is that your dog thinks chewing is FUN too, and your puppy is really just trying to play with you when he nips at a young age.

REMEMBER, when ever we can find the dogs true motivation for doing a behavior is when we have the strongest ability to control his behavior.

In this case, since we know that your dog wants to have fun, we can make sure that when he’s behaving the way we want him to (ie. not nipping) we play with him…

And the second he breaks our rules of play by nipping, we stand up, turn around and ignore him… thus withholding the one thing he wants more then anything — YOUR ATTENTION!

Keep ignoring your dog until he stops looking at you and wondering why you stopped playing, and then go back down and start playing with him again.

This will teach your puppy that nipping means the fun ends… so as long as he likes playing with you he’ll eventually stop nipping because he wants to keep playing.

It’s a gentle approach that doesn’t require you to yell, hit or get all bent out of shape trying to reprimand your dog for nipping too hard, and it’s VERY effective.

>IMPORTANT: If you do not already have my Hands Off Dog Training program it is a must have for all puppy owners.  Getting a puppy trained right while he’s still young is the STRONGEST way to make sure he doesn’t develop problems like aggression, or out of control behaviors in the future.

You can learn more about my Hands Off dog training program by clicking here:

http://thedogtrainingsecret.com

Hopefully that helps!

-Chet

P.S. If you tried this technique and it worked for you, tell me about it, I’d love to share your success with other readers to help motivate them to want to fix their dog’s problems too!

Just send your story to info@thedogtrainingsecret.com and I’ll include it in a future newsletter.

Dog Not Training Very Easily?

If your dog training is not going well, he’s not obeying and doesn’t seem to be listenting I wanted to share with you the answer to a  recent comment about the blog post I published a while back about the number one mistake to avoid making with a dog that is NOT responding to his training because he was not motivated by food.

>NOTE: If you have not yet seen my video of the number one mistake to avoid when training your dog click here:

http://thedogtrainingsecret.com/blog/river/

*** Question From A Reader ***

[Chet],

I totally agree with this type of programming [you warn about in your blog post] however what do you do if your dog is not food motivated? My dog Jack (lab/american eskimo cross) is not food motivated at all. Even when I offer him cheese he comes slowly and sniffs it and then takes it with the tips of his teeth to drop it on the floor again. Sometimes he eats it sometimes his sister gets to it Quick! It’s been a challenge training him.

Chantelle

>>> My Comments:

Chantelle,

Let me first say this about “Non Food Motivated” dogs…

9 out of 10 people who think they have a non food motivated dog, really just have a Full dog.

In a recent BBC article I read that over 50% of dogs in the UK are overweight, and 76% of their owners had no idea they’d fattened up their dogs.

So I’m not saying that your dog isn’t food motivated, but the chances are really good that you just need to cut back his food.

For some reason, animals that gorge themselves are less likely to take food treats — shocker, I know

You might want to run this by your vet, but if I was really wanting my dog to work for food, I wouldn’t have a problem feeding him once a day, and no more then twice.

Again, consult your Veterinarian if you think that’s unwise, but my hunch is they’ll side with me 95% of the time.

That being said, non food motivated animals do exist, but they’re still trainable.

Remember, the only reason I talk about using food to train your dog is because most dogs like it and it’s the fastest reward you can give that allows you to get more repetitions in.

But sometimes the emotional rewards for doing a bad behavior outweigh the desire for a food treat.  Or sometimes just ignoring you is more valuable then a food treat.

When this is the case, you have to find something that your dog likes enough to want to work for.

Take the behavior of teaching your dog to walk on a loose leash for example.

We’ve just recently launched a membership site that you can try out for free for 30 days when you order our Hands Off Dog Training course, and one of the newest videos we added was a video on how to get your dog to walk on a leash without pulling… using food as a reward.

If you’d like to see that video you can add it to your order when you get this course:

http://thedogtrainingsecret.com

And that method we show you in that video is the number one method that works for getting most dogs to stop pulling on their leash using only positive reinforcement.

However it didn’t work for my dog!

Again, this isn’t because the technique isn’t good, it’s the best technique their is.

It’s because my dog finds it MORE rewarding to sniff around and go explore his environment, then eating a food treat or playing with another dog.

So I created clever training environments where I was actually able to reward my dog for walking on a loose leash by using the reward of throwing a tennis ball.

If you’d like the full explanation of how I taught this behavior and the best way to do it, it’s one of the many methods I teach in my 8 week Emotional Conditioning program for dogs. 

To learn more about that program go here:

http://thedogtrainingsecret.com/dreamdog

So to finally answer Chantelle’s question about how to train your dog to come when he won’t take treats.

If my dog had been the kind of dog that didn’t like coming back to me for treats, I would have had a pocket full of tennis balls, and I’d NEVER, EVER, EVER throw him one for the first 6 months of his life if he didn’t first come when I called him.

I’d take a tennis ball everywhere I went, and would use it as his primary reward for listening to me.

This would condition the dog’s brain to realize that he always gets something he wants when he comes back to me.

And I can almost hear the grumblings as I write this from dog owners who are saying to themselves, “But I don’t want to always have to reward my dog for doing things all the time”.

Or they don’t want to always have treats on them.

And the good news is that you don’t have to.

There’s a process for weaning your dog off of rewards that actually increases their motivation for them to obey you more.  It’s a principal I call Random Rewarding and you can learn more about it in my Hands Off Dog Training program here:

http://thedogtrainingsecret.com

Hopefully that helps!

-Chet

P.S. Do you have a training story you’d like me to share in this newsletter?  If so please send it to info@thedogtrainingsecret.com because I’d love to brag about you

Dog Owners RAVE About New Dog Supplement

You want your dog to be healthy right?

You’ve probably seen the scary stats about how Cancer will kill more dogs then any other disease this year?

And if you’re like me you already know that the best way to make sure your dog doesn’t fall prey to Cancer is through good nutrition.

But most pet foods just don’t pack the nutritional punch dogs need to battle diseases like Cancer.

So we have to find supplements to make up for the poor food quality.

That’s why I was super excited to find Dr. Andrew Jones, an actual Veterinarian, and not some nameless, faceless vitamin company who seems to have finally put together a supplement you can add to your dogs diet that really works — what a concept right?

Read what people are saying about this new Dog Vitamin.

It’s pretty impressive!

Chet