ONE A DAY

ONE A DAY
A while back I received an e mail that invited me to find my house. I had no more than entered about a dozen letters and up pops a Google shot of my house. Now I know many of you won’t find this unusual except I live in a village of less than 5,000 people on a lake in west central Mexico. My point is everything is geared to instant results. We have “one a day” for everything from vitamins to energy drinks, instant diets, and on and on, ad-nausea.

Well this is probably the way of the day except you see I train dogs and it plain doesn’t happen that way. I get people who’s second question is “How long do you think it will take?” But in an attempt for an old timer to get on the band wagon I’ve developed a “one a day” answer to dog training. That’s right I’m going to share a system that will enable you to do a pretty acceptable job of training your dog and it’s only going to require one five minute session a day. Ready? Let’s go.

As in all our training efforts the first thing we have to do is decide exactly what it is we want to teach. No sense just starting out without some kind of a plan. Okay next you break this down into the smallest teachable and learnable component.

Still with me? Great, let’s teach our dog to come. In easy terms the come or recall requires the dog, upon hearing a verbal command and/or receiving a hand signal, to move from a detached position to a position in front of the trainer and to sit. So what would be the “smallest teachable and learnable component?”

Here’s where some folks get off on the wrong foot. They expect “puppy- poo” to jump up and run to them from ten or twenty feet away amidst any sort of variety of distractions and for no good reason except you called him.

Rule #1 Nothing is Free in the World. Translation, there must a REASON for the student to perform the task. This is called MOTIVATION. This can be positive motivation or negative motivation. We use positive motivation because the student is anxious to repeat the task and with negative motivation the student is less than enthusiastic about repeating the task.
At the early stages we use food but we can proceed to toys, balls, etc. as we develop the dog’s prey drive. The process is very simple. We “Lure” the student into position and when he has assumed our desired position we “Reward” him by opening our hand and giving him the treat.

Okay, back to our exercise. In order to instill the basics we simply want our student to move from 3 or 4 feet away and to come to us and sit. So it goes like this. Choose a very quiet environment with no distractions. No other pets, people, cell phones, TVs etc. Take a tasty treat about ¼ inch square and place it near the dog’s nose and beckon him to a position between your knees and when he gets there put the treat near his nose and move his nose up and back between his ears in a direction toward his tail. When his bum hits the floor open your hand and give him his reward for performing a COME, SIT.

As soon as the two of you get the process going smoothly you practice from a distance of NO MORE THAN four feet. Always ending exactly the same way. Beckon to you as you say “puppy come” and then moving his nose up and back as you say “Sit”. That’s it. Whole deal takes less than ten or fifteen seconds. Repeat five times, give puppy a short break and repeat another five times. Total time, less than two minutes.

Do this little exercise ONCE A DAY everyday for a week. Don’t hurry to extend the distance. Next week repeat but go for six to eight feet. Same simple five times, little break, five times more. Each week go a little further but never enough that he doesn’t respond immediately. About the fourth week have him come from behind the sofa then around the counter etc., gradually changing locations until he is rock solid on this simple basic.

If you will do this “one a day” exercise for six weeks a day your dog will blow you away with his awesome recall. Total time, 2 minutes a day X seven days X six weeks and you have 84 minutes. That’s right, not even two hours. Pretty cool eh?

The neat thing about this approach for busy people or just plain folks who don’t want to commit a bunch of time to training Fido, but they know he needs some schooling, is you can teach a new task or sharpen a skill that may be a little rusty. If you have an extra two minutes a day you could double your results.

Danielle Hardy wrote “Those who actually achieve a level of mastery are obsessed with learning, growing and improving.”
You probably read the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell . This is where he repeatedly refers to the 10,000-hour rule as what separates those who end up with great “talent” from everyone else—essentially they just out-practice everyone else.

The whole thing depends on you not Fido. If you do two simple, short minutes a day you can achieve any result you want. If it doesn’t work it’s because you didn’t persist.