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I'm very often asked if we are reinforcing a dog for being afraid, for barking, for being aggressive. And yes, it is absolutely possible to make all of those things worse if we use food or toys or praise incorrectly. Cue/mark/reinforce right? Ask our dog to do something, say 'yes' and feed a treat. That is how we build behaviours. Training emotions is different. We use food or toys or praise to CREATE a better emotional state, THEN we think about behaviours. It gets complicated though as the...
Can you even see the puppy way back there??? Did you know that at first I wondered if Runa was a bit ...ummm... slow? Or maybe I really wasn't as good of a trainer as I thought I was. I wasn't having any success teaching her regular puppy things: down, stay, hand touch. In a session, we wouldn't progress at all. Maybe I was used to border collie puppies and they really are just that much smarter than other dogs? I was confused. Let it all go for a bit - just play with the puppy. Enjoy her....
It's almost November and 2027 will be here before we know it. Going back through my camera roll, I realized what a whirlwind 2026 has been. When there was downtime, I seemed to create chaos to keep my brain busy. Along with the sad, there was a lot of good chaos. We lost Jubilee. We gained puppy Runa. I retired Caly and started riding Zephyr. Camping trips, work events, family. But then I wondered why I had so little energy left for training. Human or canine, brains love having a job, and if...