00:00:02 Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, welcome to the Houndations podcast. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about keeping your dog honest and keeping yourself honest during training sessions. This episode, I don't know, it might be a tough pill to swallow for some folks, but that's okay. Dog training, or I guess I probably should say like developing a dog. So it's not a total embarrassment at home or in the field, just a long game task that can include some shortcuts. It can include some methods that will sort of mass greater issues, but generally both those and shortcuts will come back to haunt you at some point in the dog's life. There's just a process to this stuff, which is ripe with pitfalls. But we should be self aware enough to not only keep our dogs honest, but keep ourselves honest. So buckle up because that's what I'm gonna talk about right now. I've had the good four to interview dozens and dozens of professional dog trainers in my career, and I'm truly good friends with some of them. It's always interesting how different trainers approach the same problems with dogs. Some trainers you know, often older trainers or young ones with something to prove or a program to sell. They kind of often have like very straightforward answers to questions. If you ask them how to get a dog to heal, they'll launch into a point A to B monologue on the exact steps to take. There are usually a few false starts and caveats, but mostly the road is a straight one with clear sight lines for miles. This is often great general advice, but general doesn't always apply to individual dogs. Other trainers are more philosophical, and they're much harder to interview. They don't like pigeonholing dogs or putting up too many guardrails to their advice because they know that no matter what, dogs are individuals dog owners two, and the influence they have on dogs is huge and in the realm of training often not great. The more philosophical trainers either haven't learned to tune out the constant contradictory thoughts in sort of a survival mode thing, or they just don't want to. They want to consider the dog as something more and the relationship with them as something that can't be broken down into easy steps like in a training manual. Now both styles, you know they're right and I guess that most trainers engage in both more than they let on. Now. I interviewed Ronnie Smith one time, who owned Smith Kennel's down in Oklahoma. Ronnie comes from dog Training Royalty, and there are very few trainers who can walk the aisles of a show and command the respect that he can. Now, at one point in one of our conversations, Ronnie brought up the concept of an honest dog. Now. I thought it was strange at first, because it's not a natural impulse for me to think of a dog as a liar. But that's because in my head, I have a vision of dogs that doesn't jive with the reality of a once wild canine jockeying for position in a pack, you know, an animal loaded with genetic instructions, coded for NonStop pursuit of resources. But Smith's message wasn't that dogs are liars and his job is, you know, as a trainer, has to call them out. It was that if a dog shows you something, it's generally telling you the truth with that action. What he meant was that if you ask your dog to do something and it doesn't understand what you're asking, it's going to show you that and it might not be through simply not completing the task correctly. It might look you in the eyes while you're yelling and just stare because it can't say, hey, dipshit, I'm lost here. I don't speak English and we just started this drill. And the louder you get, the more confused I get. Okay. In relationships, communication is key, and if one side isn't getting the messaging, the whole thing breaks down. This happens in marriage, it happens with friends, it happens with coworkers, it happens with our dogs. The communication that tethers us together is predicated on honesty. I shouldn't have to say that, but it demands honesty because there's no long term tethering without it. The connective tissue is just too weak. What does this have to do with dog training? Quite a bit. You want to know when your dog is being honest about something, and you want to know what to do about it. When your dog is being honest about something, you also want to know when your dog is trying to get away with something, which isn't necessarily dishonest, but it kind of is, and it's just sort of the nature of life. We look for shortcuts everywhere, so do dogs. I had a conversation recently with a fellow who works for FHF Gear here about his puppy, and we got on the topic of slippery slopes in dog training. He mentioned his dog loves retrieving more than anything in the world except food, so he has that reward lever to pull with his dog anytime he wants. Now, he's one of the people I love to work with on their dogs because he's invested in a long game. He wants an amazing dog, but is convinced he's going to make too many mistakes and ruin it. Look overthinking is a bitch, but it's about a billion times better than underthinking. I am confident his dog will be a really, really good hunter and general pet. We talked about a lot of things, but got on a topic of retrieving and how to keep a dog from taking shortcuts. The easiest one that I can think of is a dog that doesn't delivered a hand training that you like, actually teaching you how to train that. That's fodder for another podcast, which I'll probably get into this summer, but for now, a dog that brings you a bumper or a bird or whatever should deliver it to your hand. If it doesn't, there's a break in the chain that will separate further over time. What I mean by that is that the dog doesn't naturally want to bring you a bumper, Sit down, hold it for an unknown amount of time, and then let you gently take it from its mouth when you're good and ready. Dogs aren't super keen on working on someone else's schedule, but to be fair, neither are humans. You might have a dog that will follow through with a perfect retrieve, you know, steadiness at the beginning, a straight line to the bumper, sprint back, heel up, hold and wait. A dog that can do that in rain or shine, in the backyard or at the park with people everywhere is a dog that knows his job, and he's willing to do it for the reward of another retrieve. Simple stuff. Until, for whatever reason, instead of bringing the usual bumper to the park, someone grabs a chucket with a tennis ball and wings it out there. Now the game's changed. Now it has become more fun because there are fewer rules. Or maybe the rules are the same, but just by changing the object he's retrieving, it's not quite the same. So the dog comes back and drops the ball at your feet. This is a dog being honest about not knowing what he can get away with right now. It's probably not even a conscious decision, but that doesn't matter. Now he's offered up different behavior. He's taken a little shortcut, and if you scoop that ball up with the thrower and you'll wing it across that soccer field again, you've delivered a new message to him. The usual pain in the ass steps don't apply for this thing. This is the first step to unraveling a skill you work so hard to develop. And you might think, well, who cares. The dog is having fun and getting exercise and it still delivers the bumper to hand. That's great, But that bumper isn't going to keep ending up in your hand. If you keep letting him drop that ball at your feet. It's only a matter of time before he tries that with other objects. And why wouldn't he. He wants the quickest route to more retrieves while following the fewest rules. And maybe if you just let that slide with the tennis ball, you'll realize on the opening day of pheasant season that when a rooster hits the ground, you're dealing with another kind of object, another object for him to take the same kind of shortcut with. And sometimes those wily Chinese chickens have a lot of life left in them, and they run away after being dropped at your feet. And if you think your hunting buddies will let you forget about that, you're wrong to trust me. You want your dog to offer up that behavior with his retrieves every single time, on the promise that if he gets it right, there's a pretty good chance he'll get to do it again. If you can put a dog in control of whether they get a reward, they'll be more honest with you. Communication is a two way street, though, and it's up to us to be honest as well. I think the easiest way for us to get into trouble here is what I talked about a couple of weeks ago, about consistency and training and the discipline to ensure you and your dog get the reps in. But this also applies to things like e collor usage. There is no promise of a shortcut in dog training, quite like an e caller. Now. They are amazing tools when used correctly, but not so amazing when they aren't, the most common problem with them is that folks incorporate them way too quickly into a young dog's life. Now, to be fair, this often happens when a puppy hits the teenager tiny velociraptor stage, where they are a lot to handle. You know, they're full of energy and short on brains, and they do almost everything at warp speed, including everything you don't want them to do. The impulse, and it's a natural one is to get them under control, and there is a tool that promises that control, you know, the e caller. After all, the whole point of them, at least when they were first invented, was to deliver a punishment strong enough to deter whatever behavior was happening. They've morphed into a long range communication device now, which is great, but they are also built to be able to deliver that correction. But when you take a dog that doesn't really know anything and is functionally like a child, and then deliver a long range punishment for behavior that young dogs are going to do because they are energetic idiots, you're saying, I don't have the patience to do this right, or I don't understand how to get you to deliver the right behaviors to me. But now the threat of force is there, and you can take a dog that would eventually want to give you the right behavior and instead we'll do it just out of fear. And fear is a breeding ground for shortcuts, which a lot of people learn the moment they realize their dog is collar wise and for whatever reason, the collar isn't handy. Now is there a time and a place for you callers? You bet there is, but it's rarely when the dog is still super young and just learning how to be a dog in your world with your rules. When a dog knows what it is and what it's supposed to do, then an e caller can serve as a backstop for keeping those behaviors sharp and allowing you to ask so much more of them from farther away than your voice could carry. Now, we have to be honest with ourselves about the process of taking a dog from a lovable, idiot puppy to something that won't embarrass you no matter where you take it. So let's look at this in another way. Let's say you're one year old high drive setter has been in a crate for nine hours while you worked, You get home and you decide it's a good day to work on steadiness drills. But you only have twenty minutes before you have to go pick the kids up at choir and take them to swim lessons at the Why so you let Fido out, load him in the truck and head to the baseball field down the road. Now, when you let him out of your truck, you yell at him for five minutes as he runs full boar and circles and sniffs everything interesting and pisses on the fences in three spots and generally ignores you. Now your anger rises. The training session either doesn't happen or it happens, and you think your dog will always be that way. But what that dog is showing you is that you bought a high drive, high horsepower animal bread to work, and you locked him in a tiny cage for a whole day and then instantly asked him to perform once he had a little bit of freedom. Now, a five year old dog in that situation, maybe, But is that fair to a dog that's just learning the ropes? Probably not. We can't avoid putting them in a crate when they are a certain age, and sometimes any age, But we also can be more honest about what we ask of our dogs. Now, would you expect a first grader to be as attentive the first minute of recess as he or she would be during the first minute of the second class of the day. What about on a random Tuesday morning versus the Friday before Christmas? Break Dog training used to be a matter of forcing your will on them until they complied, but back then they were viewed as just kind of a living tool. Now decades later, we know better and should at least consider that maybe we aren't being honest with their situation while trying to make them adhere to rules we create that don't take into consideration their nature or their day to day circumstances. In the fact that we often ask more than they can deliver at any given point, we take their reactions as proof that they need more force, or they need the guidance of a pro or we just have a lost cause that is a lovable enough idiot but will never be truly well behaved. But the truth is that just about any dog out there, even the low bandwidth adults who just weren't blessed with much in the genetics category, can be pretty dang good. We just need to be honest about what we're working with and plug that into a system that will help them work. All the same goes for high drive well bred dogs too. By the way, these dogs might breeze through almost anything you ask them, but after a short while start to deviate from the plan, they might just be bored. And while it's important to keep them on task and get those reps in, you might have to change up your training staturgy to count for this. This is also prime time to talk about our expectations with our dogs and how we often try to do the same thing with a new dog that worked with the old one. I did this with my pup, Sadie, but she's nothing like my older dog Luna. Sure, they both have pretty good blood and they love to retrieve and work, but Sadie just needed so much softer of an approach, and she needed so much more reassurance. Luna just never needed that. She kind of just bowled her way through everything. She wanted direct communication because all she cared about was picking up the bumper or finding the grouse. Sadie wanted me to explain everything and give her the chance to get over whatever fears were rattling around in her smooth brain, while Luna was just not scared of anything. So to train my puppy the way that I trained Luna would have been a disaster. And I know this because I tried. But Sadie told me flat out that she needed something different. The easiest thing for me to do, though, was to default to the process that most recently worked for me in a different dog. But it wasn't the same dog, and honestly, I wasn't the same trainer, even though I kind of tried to be. Now, I guess to tie a bow on this one, I should end on this note. Nothing I've said here is meant to be permission to just phone it in or lower your standards so much that the dog can't help but succeed. Our dogs need to be challenged. They need to have jobs. They are primed to learn. They want to learn with you from you. I don't think they necessarily choose to teach us anything, but that doesn't change the fact that they do, in fact, teach us a lot. They show us how they need to be taught, in what ways in which they'll test our boundaries to see if they can lean a little more into their nature and a little further away from the rules we set for them. They'll tell us when they just don't understand something, but it's on us to listen to them and to decide if they're being honest or they're just looking for a way to get that next retrieve to happen a couple seconds faster. They'll tell us when they need a couple of minutes to run around and sniff before they can settle into training mode, or when the time comes in their life where they can tamp that urge down and show up for the job, no matter how many hours they've been cooped up, or how much they want to stretch their legs and go full greyhound for a little while. I think that a lot of us want that point a to be dog training advice, because that's intuitive and it's easy to understand. It answers a question. But there is none of that without the other, more philosophical side, because dogs aren't machines, and neither are we. There are millions of inputs and a million distractions, and there's a whole bunch of intangibles that can flavor any of the interactions we have with them. The more we understand and acknowledge that and work to be honest about the day to day stuff while sticking to that bigger picture plan, the more they'll learn to be honest with us for no other reason. Then that results in them being able to do more of what they love with the person they love more than anything. I think that's pretty damn cool, honestly, So think about that. Think about coming back in two weeks because I'm going to talk about why we should all try to understand pack animals and pack animal behavior so that we can just better understand our dogs and how we can work with them. That's it. I'm Tony Peterson and this has been The Houndation's podcast. Thank you so much for listening and for all of your support. We truly appreciate it. Here at Meat Eater. All of us do without you, guys, we don't have anything, So thank you for showing up for us. 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