Category : Labradoodles

Teaching Your Dog to Come When Called, No Matter What!

Sometimes I think I am a Golden Retriever, everything is exciting to me, everything is fun, everything should be a game and everything is important, I guess I am blonde.

I giggle when I look back at my dog training videos and my articles because to me EVERYTHING is critical!  Teaching your dog to leave it, crate training, leash training everything is vital to you and your dog.  And, to be honest, it really is.  All dog training and the victory over behavior problems ensures that you keep your dog and that you both remain happy.

BUT, the #1 most important obedience command for EVERY dog is the recall or come command.

Does Your Dog Come When Called?

So what happens if your dog is off leash, he sees a bunny or a deer and goes chasing after it?  Will he leave that distraction and come to you when you call him?  What if there is a car coming?

Recently a good friend lost his world champion obedience dog because he was chasing deer and blindsided by a car.  I am still devastated for them both.  It can certainly happen to anyone who’s dog is off leash, and I can only hope and train hard and pray it never happens to me or my dogs. Read the rest of this entry »

Teaching Your Dog Drive, Eye Contact and Focus for More Leash Skills

This is part 3 of a 4 part series of teaching your dog how to listen and obey you, without pulling while he is on a leash.  If you didn’t read my first two installments please do so first here: The Premise of the Magical Dog Leash  and The Magical Dog Leash Part 2: Finding Heel 

In my opinion, Drive and Focus are essential to good dog training and leash skills.

For those of you who are not familiar with the terms I first want to break them down for you so that you can understand what I, and others are talking about when we use these words.

Drive: There are several types of “drives” in dog training; play/prey drive and fight/defensive drives.  When I write articles about drive, I am referring to the play/prey drive function that is innate with most dogs.

Most dogs have some kind of play or prey drive.  When they see a small critter running their automatic response is to give chase and play.  Even if they don’t want to chase animals they may pounce, bite and squeak toys!

The nice thing about this “drive” is that you can increase it, decrease it and learn to control it. Read the rest of this entry »

Finding Your Dog’s Motivator

This is another one of those back to basics posts, but it is really crucial to understand!

In order to use positive reinforcement, you have to find your dog’s motivator or motivators.

You must motivate your dog to listen to you.

If you can’t motivate you are, sadly, left with force and coercion.

Motivation is a term that refers to a process that elicits, controls and sustains certain behaviors.   For instance, if you have not eaten and you are hungry; food may be a motivator.

Coercion is the practice of forcing someone or something to behave in a certain manner by the use of threats or some other form of pressure or force.

Typically in dog training these are the types of training we utilize.  You can motivate your dog to listen by building a relationship and finding his motivators or you can use your physicality and force your dog to comply.

I personally like motivating my dog.  Someday, I may be unable due to illness or injury to force my dog to comply and what would happen then if our relationship was based on force?  Even if I am physically able, I just don’t like force or compulsion.  I think that we “thinking” animals should use our minds to control our animals not our physical force.

You need to find your dog’s motivators if you expect to use your mind (and not your body) to control him! Read the rest of this entry »

The Magical Dog Leash Part 2: Finding Heel

If you didn’t catch my last article “The Premise of the Magical Dog Leash” please read it.  In that article I explain WHY flawed thinking and many people’s approach to leash training hasn’t worked.

If you don’t understand WHY things haven’t worked in the past or the common pit falls you won’t be as successful in teaching your dog the appropriate way!

Now it is time to TEACH your dog appropriate leash skills!

What are Appropriate Leash Skills?

Finding Heel Position: Teaching your dog to find heel position on your left side at the drop of a hat on quiet and clear command.

Drive and Focus:  Teaching your dog to play, find you fun, and give you eye contact on command and while you walk and heel past distractions.

Leash Manners: Teaching your dog how long his leash is and NEVER to pull you! Read the rest of this entry »

The Premise of the Magical Dog Leash

There is no such thing as a magical leash, unfortunately.  You cannot simply hook your dog or your puppy up to a leash and expect miracles to happen.  My life would be a lot easier and more profitable if there were such an attachment.

I think when people get a dog they want to slap a leash on and go for a walk, but instead there begins a tug of war usually with the dog winning; and the person and the dog end up totally frustrated and truly unsatisfied with the whole experience.

The problem is that we, as dog owners, don’t take the time or don’t understand that we need to TEACH our dogs what we want and what our expectations are for them when they are on a leash.

As I read through comments to a recent article “Weaning Yourself and Your Dog from Compulsion Dog Training Collars”  and I kept finding myself responding by saying “TEACH your dog what you want” I realized maybe people just don’t understand what I mean or how to do it.

So these are going to be very much back to basics articles.

It is my opinion, from what I see, that we expect to have to teach our dogs to sit, lay down, stay and other various commands but what effort do we put into teaching them about their leashes and what our expectations of them are while they are on it?  Read the rest of this entry »

The Top 5 Most Important Dog Training Mistakes to Avoid

People always ask me how I, as a professional dog trainer, make dog training look so easy and how can they can improve their techniques?

I came up with what I believe to be the 5 most important reasons people have difficulty training their dog to work effectively for them.

These are the 5 Most Important Dog Training Mistakes to Avoid, in what I believe to be the most important order.

#5  Lack of Practice or Effort

I have said it before (sometimes I feel like I talk about the same things) but I say it again because it is soooo important!

Practice is crucial!  Your dog WILL NOT learn at obedience class once a week.  I use to tell all my dog obedience students this on the first night of class, and YES most were appalled that I would admit it

Your dog learns through repetition and training AT HOME!  If you are not making a point to work your dog daily or several times a day or week, you will not reap the benefits of a well trained dog!! Read the rest of this entry »

Aspiring to Better Dog Obedience

I use to be on one of those public weight loss programs.  I joined it with my best friend many years ago, and let me just say IT WORKED.  Why?  You ask, why did it work?  What was the secret to weight loss?  Accountability! Is the answer.

I will say it gave us so great knowledge and coping skills and together we had a peer group and a support system to rely.  All of this ensured that we were successful!  We had to weigh-in in front of someone every 2 days.   They were NEVER negative at the weigh-ins and never gave us a hard time about gaining or not losing they were always supportive and willing to give us support and more information when we needed it.

What does weight loss have to do with dog training?  Accountability!

The reason my weight loss program worked?  I had to weigh-in in front of someone every other day, and although they were not negative about our weigh-ins; I did not want to fail or even stay the same.  I felt like I HAD to show progress.  I had a goal and my long term goal was to lose weight, but my short term goal was to not be embarrassed on the scale every 2 days!

Accountability makes a HUGE difference, at least for me.  If I am left to my own devices, I might not choose the right road.  I often get lazy and put off things like: dog training or weight loss.  I always have tomorrow, right?

In order to run every day, I need to train for a half marathon or marathon and put smaller goals on my calendar. Read the rest of this entry »

3 Little-Known Tips for Training a Labradoodle Puppy

In your search across the internet for information on how to train Labradoodle puppies, I wanted to give you something a bit more fresh and interesting.  I wanted to give you something besides the typical, advice that every other site on the internet has to give.

So what you aren’t going to find in this article are any basic puppy obedience training tips like what to feed your puppy, how to potty train your puppy, or how to teach it to stay.  Those are all important topics that I cover in my Hands Off dog training course, so I’m not going to talk about them here.

Instead I thought I’d talk to you about something much more important.

But before I reveal three unconventional tips for training your Labradoodle puppy, I’d like to set the stage by asking you a simple question…

What Seeing a Crappy Doctor For a Sprained Toe,
Taught Me about Dog Training

How do you like it when you seek out an expert for their opinion, and they only tell you what you want to hear instead of what you NEED to hear?

You try to ask them intelligent questions, but sometimes you don’t know enough about the topic to even know what questions should be asked.

Most doctors are like this.

Take the doctor I recently went to see to check out my sprained toe, for example.

I’d been running on it a lot and it was really sore, like I’d strained it in someway.  So what does the doctor do?

He prescribes me some anti-inflammatory pain medication and tells me to stay off it for a while.

In this case, the doctor only addressed the specific problem I asked him about, and then tried to put a band aid over it.

One month later my toe was still sprained.  So I went to see another doctor or a second opinion.

This second Doctor was nothing like the first doctor.  Sure she listened to me complaining about my toe, and instead of prescribing me pain meds, she started searching for what caused my toe to be sprained in the first place.

She looked at the bone structure in my foot, noticed it was all out of whack, adjusted the foot back to the way it was supposed to be.  Then she explained to me that it’s common for the bodies foot structure to break down when the digestive system isn’t working correctly.

So sure enough, she checks my enzyme and bacterial levels of my stomach and discovers I am out of whack… and advices me that taking two herbal remedies should fix the problem in less then a month.

And she was right!

You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know Either!

So why do I tell you this crazy story about my doctor visits for a sprained toe?

Because I’m afraid that in your search for information on how to train your Labradoodle, that you’ll make the same problem I made with my first doctor.

You’ll only get answers from people who answer your specific question, instead of answers from people who’ll dig deeper and tell you the answers to questions you NEEDED to know, but didn’t know to even ask.

So that’s why I’ve decided to write this article on…

3 Puppy Training Techniques You Must Know

Rarely Talked About Method #1: The Nothing In Life is Free Principle

The reason I’ve listed The Nothing In Life is Free Principle first, is because it can set a stronger foundation for your Labradoodle then you ever realized was possible.

The reason why it’s such an effective principle is because it allows you to talk to your dog’s CORE; that part of your dog that has been genetically inherited from hundreds and hundreds of years of captive breeding.

You see, whether you like it or not, your Labradoodle’s original ancestors were wolves.  And the genetic characteristics that have kept wolves alive for so many generations are embedded into your dog’s brain at some level.

Some have more, and some have less, but they’re still there on some level.

These genetic traits affect the way your Labradoodle looks at his world, and how he interprets it.

They cause your Labradoodle to make judgments of you that you don’t even realize are happening.

Your Labradoodle is assessing how you answer the door, how you feed him his food, and where you let him sleep and giving you a daily leadership grade that you probably never knew he was giving.

How good a “Leadership Grade” your dog gives you on a daily basis, effects in large part, how easy your dog will mind and obey your commands.

I give an in depth presentation that covers dozens of methods for how to get a better leadership score from your dog in my Emotion Training for Dogs program, but for time constraints here’s a good rule of thumb to follow.

Make your Labradoodle EARN
everything he wants in his life!

The more your dog realizes that everything he wants needs to be received from you, your children, and the members of your family, the less likely he is to develop behavior problems like aggression.

Start asking your dog to sit before you pet him.  Make him wait for permission before coming running out the front door.  Train him to lay on a bed before he can greet strangers that come in your home.  And my favorite… train him that the ONLY way to get table scraps is if he lays on a mat throughout the entire time your family is eating a meal at your dinner table!

By making your dog ask for permission for everything he wants in his life, you are setting a framework up in your dog’s brain where he’ll be much more willing to listen and obey your commands.

Rarely Talked About Method #2: Beware of “Emotional Charging”

You’ll almost never hear the concept of Emotional Charging talked about, but paying attention to this principle at an early stage in your Labradoodle’s life will make him soooo much calmer to live with.

Here’s how this dog training principle works:  It is a FACT that you can trigger your dog to feel an emotion on cue.

The famous Pavlov experiments proved this, where Dr. Pavlov trained dogs to salivate on cue at the sound of a bell, even though NO food was present… basically training them to feel hungry.

Pavlov’s experiments are incredibly popular and almost everybody knows of them, but what nobody talks about is how we might accidentally train our dogs to feel negative emotions on cue.

You see, all that is required to train a dog to *feel* an emotion on cue is to consistently present your dog a signal of any kind, right before he feels the emotion.

If you think about it, us humans are no different either. For most of us, if you want to trigger us to feel nervous, simply tell us that we’re going to be stepping onto a stage and giving a public presentation within 24 hours. Our bodies will physically start to change at this news. Our heart rates will increase, we’ll sweat more, or brain will become less aware of our surroundings and more focused on internal thoughts etc.

Or in a more positive light, think about how Children behave the day or two before Christmas.

Children aren’t born with that intense excitement for opening presents on Christmas morning, it was emotionally programmed into them. And if for some crazy reason your kids hated Christmas, all you’d have to do is make sure they got everything they wanted on their lists for a few years in a row, and they’d like Christmas again. (I realize that might not possible for most of our budgets, but you get the principle)

So really, we all believe emotions can be programmed. You’ve witnessed it hundreds of times, you’ve just never taken the time to realize how to use it in a more constructive way.

The mistake that most of us make with emotions is that we let them be programmed into ourselves, and our pets automatically, without realizing that we have control over that programming.

Here’s an example…

If You’re Wondering Why Your Dog’s Hyper,
You Wanna Try Looking In The Mirror

For many dogs, people are exciting.

When a new person comes to your door, your dog stands a good chance of getting his butt rubbed, being pet, or at least some attention, right?

For many dogs, they get so worked up and excited that they have to be put outside when strangers come over, because they are simply too out of control.

But let’s look at why this is?

New people coming over is a lot like Christmas is to young children.  It’s an opportunity to get something it really wants.

And let’s face it, what person coming over to your home could resist your cute little Labrador puppy?

Your Puppies “Cute Factor” Works Against Him

Because strangers are always coming over and doting on how cute a puppy is, it conditions most dogs to get excited to see new people.

If left unchecked, the excitement that builds up inside your dog becomes so strong that he can’t control it.

Think Kids who get so excited for Christmas presents they start misbehaving.

In order to fix this behavior, you need to break this habit of strangers doting on your pup.  Remember the Nothing in Life is Free Principle?  It applies here as well.

What I recommend to my clients is that the first skill they should train their dog is not sit, stay or come… but to go lay on his mat.  And I recommend that this behavior is the behavior that require their young puppy to do when people come over.

If you’ll cue your dog to go lay on his mat and stay there when new people come over, it allows him to practice self control away from the people who come to your home, instead of getting worked up and doted on at your feet.

I recommend you train your dog to continue to lay on his mat, until your guests are situated before allowing your dog off his mat to mingle with guests.

If you can, try to help your guests ask your pup to sit before doting on them.  They might think you’re a bit of an anal dog owner, but as your dog ages, you’ll have people telling you how lucky you are to have a dog with such self control when he automatically sits in front of guests calmly… and only you and I will know LUCK had nothing to do with it

If you’d like a free video on how to teach a puppy to go to his mat go here:

Free Train Your Dog To Go To His Mat Video

Rarely Talked About Method #3: Increasing your Dog’s Social IQ

The final concept I wanted to talk to you about is vital, yet ignored by many.  I call it, Increasing your Dog’s Social IQ.

I took this concept from a wonderful book called, Social Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. The book was written for humans who wanted to improve their ability to get along with others.

The key concept that Daniel Goleman brings up in his book is that some people seem to have the ability to read extremely subtle facial cues of the people they interact with.  And the better you can read others’ facial cues, the easier it is for you to make friends and feel comfortable around other people.

I believe that this same concept holds true for dogs, and that their is a window of opportunity for you to teach this to your dog that will determine how Social your dog will be around other dogs.  Of course it’s not the only thing, but I believe it is a crucial skill that you need to focus on.

Teaching Your Dog To Read
Other Dog’s Body Language

The key to teaching your dog to effectively read the body language of other dogs is simple.  So simple that you might just pass over it and think it doesn’t matter.  Do that at your own peril.

The best way to teach your dog to effectively and accurately read the body language of other dogs is to make sure that you only allow him to interact with other dogs who have a hi Social IQ.

I personally did this by finding a local doggy day care that pre-screened dogs as social or un-social for being allowed into their doggy day care.

This particular facility would have about 30 pre-screened Hi social IQ dogs at a time.  And they let them all out to play in a pen with each other.  If a dog started a problem with another dog, it was removed from the group and isolated into a pen by itself.

This created an environment where I could bring my young puppy at the age of 11 weeks and let him play with these other dogs.  This allowed my dog to learn from the pack, and develop a Hi social IQ, where he can read the emotions of another dog at a distance and know if that dog wants to play, or wants to be left alone.

This allowed my dog to learn all the proper dog etiquette from dogs who already knew it!

Your Dog Can ONLY Learn
This From Other Dogs!

You can’t teach this to your dog, he needs to learn it from other GOOD dogs.

And to show you how effective this method is I’ll end with this story…

I was at the park playing fetch with my dog.  The park was HUGE and there were two other dogs there as well.

My dog was off leash and free to roam, so when he spotted the first dog he ran off to play with her at a dead sprint.

Both dogs were sprinting full speed at each other as if they’d rehearsed it for months, both dogs stopping on a dime to say hello with a butt sniff… then proceeded to play happily with each other.

I didn’t think anything of it then, until my dog spotted the OTHER dog on the other side of the park who had managed to break away from his owners leash and had also taken off at a full sprint towards my dog.

Thinking this dog wanted to play too, my pup took off towards the new dog just like the first, at a full sprint.

But instead of stopping on a dime close enough to sniff the new dogs butt.  My dog sensed something was different and came to a dead halt 20 yards from the other dog, where both dogs stared at each other.

My dog was somehow able to read the body language of this dog and know that it should not be messed with… turned around and left.

Now I don’t know how that situation might have turned out if my dog hadn’t stopped, but I’m guessing a fight would have broken out, and potentially gotten one of the dogs hurt.

Something was obviously conveyed in that dog’s body language that no amount of training could have taught my dog to see, besides LOTS of exposure to good dogs who could teach him how to read other dog’s body language, and I’m darn thankful I’d put him in an environment where he could learn it.

Here’s hoping this information helps you tremendously!

If you’re looking for additional information on the courses I provide for training perfect puppies you can read more about them here:

Hands Off Dog Training for Obedience or…

Emotion Training 4 Over reactive Dogs