Nose work is a great sport where you can carry your reward right with you into the trialing environment and that allows your training and your trialing to be seamless…………….unless you want to use toys. I have a toyaholic dog, a high drive BC that loves to tug. The struggle in NW comes in when […]
Author Archive | Margaret
Stay on the Rails!
When I think of forward motion you can’t get much more forward than a train, not much can stop a train, but a de-railment can. Most de-railments are minor, a slight disruption of forward motion, while others can be quite serious and lead to a lot of damage. Nosework careers can be likened to trains […]
May your weakness be your strength
A weakness sounds awful, doesn’t it? Not strong enough, not big enough or something that is less than something else. Sometimes in our dog training, we can find we have weaknesses. Maybe we show a few weekends in a row and realize that our heeling isn’t as strong as we thought as our […]
When Limiting Yourself is a Good Thing
Did you ever think of a limitation as a good thing? If you are a dog trainer, limiting your self is a great thing, especially when applied to your training sessions and how much you ask of your dog. By limiting yourself to a particular pre-set time, amount of reinforcement or repetitions, you can get […]
REAL LIFE, REAL RECALLS FOR REAL DOGS AND TRAINERS
That is the attitude I want on my recall! I had just come back from a Bailey/Farhoody Chicken Workshop and had a consult with a young family with a lovely young lab. One of the main reasons I was there was that they could not get the dog to reliably come in […]
Why is the Predictable so hard to do?
You mean to be consistent, right? You know exactly what you want, no problem. Why do you find yourself rewarding what you don’t want then? Why did you get that head drop on the figure 8, or the dog that comes off the nose work hide, instead of staying there? Welcome to the […]
Small Things are Big Things
The devil is in the details, right? Nothing could be truer then when you shape a behavior. When you shape a behavior you are rewarding the dog for approximations toward your end behavior. Now here is the thing, what will those be? Can you tell I might be teaching a retrieve class 🙂 I am […]
Why the Drop in Ring Performance?
Probably one of the most common problems I see trainers face is that their dogs can perform beautifully at home, or their training building, but then when they go to show, they have a different dog. This happening one time can be due to an unusual circumstance. Perhaps the dog has not been generalized […]
To Click or Not to Click?
Taking the Show on the Road
Spring is right around the corner, and for many of us that means show season is here! Are you getting ready to show your dog? How do you decide when your dog is ready? What shows to enter? How many shows in a row do you enter? All of these can greatly affect your performance […]
