This is partly why the world is full of untrained dogs. MY AGENDA I have three primary objectives with this program: 1. To get you to do it. Not just to acquire the technical know-how, but to actually do the legwork. Dog training is expensive behavior (in terms of time and en- ergy) for people. There is more than one behavior to train. Each one requires many steps and a lot of repetition. The fruits of the …show more content…
So I have my work cut out for me.
2. To get you to drop any detrimental baggage you might be carrying in your head about motivating your dog. (See “The Not-So-Awful Truth about Moti- vation” later in this introduction.) No motivation, no training. Well-meaning but ill-informed trainers have misled generations of owners about this. Most trainers lack formal education in animal learning, a subject with sixty years of relevant research. Nevertheless, dog owners have a right to greater competence. 3. To give you fail-safe progressions for the important behaviors that most peo- ple want. Most people do not have time to bone up on all relevant animal learning principles and derive from them sound training plans. Luckily, effi- cient recipes—fleshed out training progressions—already exist for the big ticket behaviors: sit, down, stay, come when called, and so on. These have been vetted on hundreds of dogs at the academy and thousands of dogs in private settings, so you will not have to reinvent the wheel. Getting Enough Training In My guess is that some—maybe even a lot—of you have a little spark of latent train- er inside; that capacity for fascination with the process, since you did buy a