When Pigs Fly_ Training Success With Impossible Dogs - Jane Killion [6]
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Working Without a Net
Understanding the “Pigs Fly” Training System
I am going to tell you a dirty secret about dog training. Only about 10% of dog training is about training any particular behavior, like sit, down, or come. The other 90% of dog training is about getting your dog in a frame of mind where he is willing and able to pay attention and learn. Your average Golden Retriever or Sheltie is in, or close to being in, the frame of mind necessary to learn behaviors. Your Pigs Fly dog is not. That is why, despite the fact that there are any number of very good positive dog training books which show you how to train the basics, like sit, down, and come, most people who own Pigs Fly kinda dogs cannot get their dogs to perform with any reliability. Their dogs are just not engaged in the process.
First you have to teach your dog to want to work. You don’t need to nag your dog, he can learn to offer to do things for you.
One Foot in Front of Another
Steps to Success
It is very important that you realize your primary task is to shape your dog’s mind-set, not train any particular behavior. Once you have your dog in the correct frame of mind, you can teach him anything in short order. Most people head to the bookstore or to training class because they want their dog to learn the canon of pet obedience—sit, down, stay, come, loose leash walking, and polite greeting rituals. As you go through this book, you will see that we don’t begin with teaching those behaviors. We begin with lots of learning games that may seem irrelevant to you. You will find that sometimes we take a very long time to teach a behavior when there might be a way to teach it more quickly. There is a reason for this. The games we play and the way we teach them will fundamentally begin to change the way your dog thinks and prepare him to learn anything you want him to learn. You have to bear with me and take your dog systematically through the process. Remember, the non-biddable breeds in Scott and Fuller’s study performed better than the “easy to train” breeds when presented with a problem that they had to figure out on their own. Under the Pigs Fly system, whenever possible, we are going to hand the problem over to the dog and give him room to do what he naturally does best—think it out.
Here is a summary of the steps I will take you through in this book:
1. Discover How Dogs Learn
You need to have a basic understanding of the laws of learning. Training your dog is like a card game where you hold all the “consequence” cards and your dog holds all the “behavior” cards. Learning the rules of how to get your dog to trade his “behavior” cards for your “consequence” cards is the first step.
2. Learn To Use the Clicker
The clicker is a small noise-making device that communicates to your dog that he has performed something correctly. The clicker is your power tool to communicate with your dog.
3. Get Your Dog to Offer
Your goal is to get your dog to start offering to do stuff for you without being asked. Although the exercises in this section may seem like silly games with no practical application, this is actually the most crucial section of the book. The big divide between the average Labrador and the average Fox Terrier is that the Labrador is often looking for ways to do what you want, whereas the Fox Terrier is looking for ways to get the heck away from you and do what he wants. Doing the exercises in this part can shape the Fox Terrier to think more like the Labrador.
4. Shaping
You are going to learn to get your dog to do things in small steps, using only the clicker and some rewards—the ultimate “hands free” training. This is the section where you may be thinking that there are much easier ways to teach your