Old Trainer: Keeping your dog engaged with fun during training sessions

Dear Old Trainer: Thanks so much for the tip on how much easier it is to train a dog when you make training a game. Once I relaxed and started letting Rinca, my year-old mixed breed, have fun she started learning things immediately and loves it when we work on commands. The part she loves best is when I tease her about what command is coming next. I’ve learned so much about her since I made the change.

Paula, Independence, Kansas

A: Dogs are the same as humans when it comes to training. They learn fast when they have a good time, lose interest when bored.

When someone tells me of problems training their dog I remind them of the wisdom of the great Chinese General, Sun Tzu, “If words of command to the troops are not obeyed, the general is to blame.”

If you have a problem training your dog the blame falls on you, not your dog. And in most instances the problem is you are teaching in a way that bores your dog. And probably bores you as well.

People wonder if I know what I’m doing when they watch me train a dog because I spend so much time having fun and loving on the dog. They figure I’m spending my time playing and just happen to remember to do a command now and then.

Training should be fun, and people are shocked at how much faster their dog learns when fun is integrated into the learning process as a training tool, not a separate thing you do some other time.

The easy way to add fun is to keep the training session short and play games your dog likes between repetitions. After your dog obeys the command several times throw a ball a while then come back to the lesson. If you dog likes tug of war more than retrieving, play tug of war between reps.

If your dog is a lover then nothing is better than loving on her between commands. Once it dawns on a dog that the faster they obey the command the faster they get loved on they start clicking off commands before the words are out of your mouth.

And as Paula points out, dogs love it when you tease them about which command you are going to give next. Buster, my Aussie/Beagle mix, is so anxious to do the next command so I’ll throw the Frisbee for him he gets annoyed, grabs my pants leg, and tries to pull me around the yard if I don’t give the command fast enough to suit him.

Watch your dog and you’ll see if she is losing interest during training sessions. That’s when you get creative and invent ways to have so much fun she can’t wait for the next lesson.

Clarification — A few columns back I confused everyone, including myself, while describing how to clean dog dishes weekly when I wrote, “…wash with soap and water, rinse, then add half a cup apple cider vinegar in the dish with two cups water.”

As a number of readers pointed out, that made no sense. What I meant to say was “…rinse with one half cup of a mixture of half apple cider vinegar/half water to kill germs.”

This story was originally published February 21, 2020 at 9:09 PM.