Am I a thickie, or is dog training becoming overcomplicated?

To me, dog training is a very simple thing, it has to be, because I am too. Dogs, for the most part, are also very simple things, and yet I see so many posts pages long about training simple behaviours. And I'm sure they're really informative, it's just I lose the will to live after paragraph 53, and wonder how dog training ever got so complicated?

There are two things I bear in mind when I train my dogs, I have to be motivated, dog has to be motivated, and then look at what makes those two things work. Sometimes a dog works better for treats, sometimes better for another reward. I'm a firm believer in that although dogs have innate ability, they are also all individual, and what works for one may not work for another.

This is prompted btw, by posts on various forums, including this one, that, if I were a relative newbie to any form of dog training, I'd think were written in a foreign language, for me and my dog. Are we getting too complicated in trying to describe the interaction that happens between us and our dogs when training?

There are only two secrets to dog training:

make it simple for the dog to understand

provide sufficient reward.

However IME many owners cannot do either!

Also what is a "simple behaviour" walking on the lead (look at the amount of posts on the difficulty of doing this); retrieving (when I have held courses or attended them where a prerequisite is "dog must have a basic retrieve" I am no longer amazed at the number (majority) who do not have one; I could go on.

One of the reasons for this is not that anyone makes dog training MORE complicated, it is that Mrs A's version of a basic retrieve aint mine for example!

Also people want to train their dogs say to do (insert relevant sport) but they do not have the bog standard domestic control of their dog in a "pet" situation.

Ps I attended a seminar with Denis Steurs last year who was nothing but blunt. He gave an example of an individual who had travelled all the way from the UK to Belgium to his training ground for some protection training. When Denis saw that the owner could not open the back of his vehicle whilst his dog remained quietly under control until told to get out, he told him to close the door and not bother to come back until he had managed this, because if he could not control his dog in the back of his car, he certainly did not have sufficient control to train a dog that was going to bite!

It was very motivating for the handler............

Smokeybear I have just laughed at your post above cos the control getting out of the boot crate is the one thing that i really have to tackle next! I have dogs who sit, lay, stay, leave, and some heel work, they retrieve etc but b****y hell the minute the crate door is opened they go manic to get out and get on with it!

So this made me laugh! I know it is me that has to change it!

Exactly when you have a dog and you do not want to compete with it, what you want is what I call basic domestic control. What is this:

Comes when told
Stops when told
Stays when told

This + walking nicely on lead and not barking unless told to will demonstrate that you have your dogs under control, what else do you need?

Voila, simples! (or not as simple as it would appear........)

I do struggle myself with literally following step by step guides because no matter how much i have read them, it isnt practical to literally read and train at the same time. I work to the pace/way my dog sets and have an expectation of them that we will get there.

I am fortunate in that they are both fairly quick to learn and sometimes follow each others lead, and they seem to do a lot of passive learning, looking like they have barely grasped something when we finish a training session but the next time you try the behaviour has sunk in without any of my input, so i can then reinforce it but the full understanding seems to appear when we finish!

I wonder if my approach to dog training is linked to my work with very young children, because they do seem to learn in a similar way and need similar skills from me.

The technical term for what you have observed is latent learning, as I am sure you know if you are a teacher of people, little or big!¬

Step by step guides are not written to be held in hand whilst training but to be read, digested so that you understand the reason WHY you do something If you do not have a competent trainer handy (which is one of the reasons I wrote my retrieve article and others).

Many people do not explain to learners the WHY of doing something or not doing it, and often the learner says "mrs x does this and it works" without knowing that perhaps Mrs X dog is genetically programmed to do that task; one of the reasons so many gundogs are passed on, is because a HUGE number of gundog owners (and by that I mean those who work or compete their dogs) have NO idea how to train a retrieve as they have always had dogs that " just do it".

That is great until you come across a dog that does not, then they are all at sea as they have never actually TRAINED a dog to retrieve....................and so of course instead of identifying a weakness in THEMSELVES say that the dog is "faulty" and move it on.............

Thanks, I know what they seem to do, not what it is called, my husband and I are childminders, and an important part of our work is understanding how the little ones learn (not need to know all the techie terms), but being able to adapt what we do to get through to them in the best way, and so we are constantly assessing the youngsters in our care and so although new to dogs (6 months!) our skills have come in handy to handle to young pups!

I try and teach whole behaviours, only getting the technical complicated steps briefly to aid my understanding of why/how if i need to understand logic to it etc, and yes i really think some people over complicate it, which automatically makes you overprocess and analyse which i think some dogs pick up on and it can cause hesitation.

I know a couple of our instances in training that i struggled to teach the dog because i didnt understand the purpose of the behaviour and as soon as i was told and got my head around it, teaching the dog was the easiest, they could sense my hesitation because i went about it the same way but they must have picked up my confusion.

So i say the simpler you make it for yourself the simpler it will be for the dog!

I try and teach whole behaviours

Ah but I don't!

As I said in my retrieve article this is a prime example of what is NOT a whole behaviour, it is a chain and that is why people muck up retrieves.

If I go to a class this is what I see and hear:

Fido, sit, fido sit, fido sit, stay...........

thing is thrown (wait, wait, wait)

Fido "fetch it", "hold", "good boy" "come"

Handler dances about left to right, trying to pull dog in straight waves hands about in the air then puts them on waist and if they are very lucky the dog does go out, pick it up (without going over to chat to Rover, have a sniff or hunt around for one of those treats that Mrs X dropped) and comes BACK (hurrah); if they are even luckier, the dog does not drop it and tootle off, nor does it hang on to it for dear life; then after the handler has "caught it" the dog is told to "heel".

What the handler does not understand is that the dog does not actually understand what it is supposed to be doing............... but they BELIEVE it does, and then they start to get cross when the dog does not go out, does not pick it up, chews it, drops it, does not come back etc etc etc

Still it makes entertaining viewing; I once counted a total of 16 commands with one handler and one dog for a retrieve!

It is a bit like toilet training, you do not expect a toddler to recognise it needs to go, toddle off to the bathroom, take off its nappy, climb onto the toilet seat, position itself correctly, wipe its bottom effectively, get down, put nappy back on, flush the toilet and then wash its hands.................. the first time you start the process...........

I have been on a gundog training forum, just for other things to learn, and i too have been surprised at the number of owners who can work a dog that 'can do' but have no idea how to really get to the 'can do' and are as much as sea with some of the training as an average pet owner, and some are even going clicker based!