Creative Dog Training Tips: 10 Ways to Teach an Old Dog New Tricks |

Creative Dog Training Tips: 10 Ways to Teach an Old Dog New Tricks

| By Roy Rasmussen | Category: Dog Training

Creative dog training techniques have emerged over the past few decades as the psychology of human behavior modification has been increasingly applied to dogs. Traditional dog training techniques have been refined to optimized effectiveness, and ineffective methods have been replaced with better alternatives.

Beating your dog with a newspaper, rubbing its nose in dirt, and yelling at it are now known to be not just unnecessary, but less effective than more humane options. Here are ten ways you can apply psychological principles to make your dog obedience training more gentle, effective, and fun for you and your dog.

1. Plan a Training Curriculum

Your dog training will be more effective if you follow an organized training curriculum just like a teacher does. Organize your dog’s learning in a logical sequence that progresses step-by-step from simpler skills to more complex tasks. For instance, when housebreaking a puppy, you will find it easiest if you teach it to recognize where its den is first before teaching it to relieve itself outside its den. Likewise, a simpler skill like learning to sit should be taught before a more complex skill like learning to sit-stay. Breaking more difficult skills down into pieces like this enables you to lay a foundation one step at a time, making the training process easier and more effective.

2. Keep a Training Journal

Professional athletes keep a training journal to track their progress from one workout to the next and one season to the next. This enables them to identify benchmarks, evaluate how far they’ve come towards reaching their goals, and focus on areas that need improvement. You can apply the same method to dog training. Use your curriculum to lay out the benchmarks that define your dog’s progress, and keep track from one day to the next what your dog has already learned, what it’s struggling with, and what needs to be worked on next.

3. Train One Skill Per Session

Your dog will learn better if you train one skill per session. Trying to do more will dilute your focus and confuse both of you.

4. Reinforce Skills Several Times Per Session

Your dog learns through reinforcement. About five repetitions of the target skill per session tends to work well.

5. Keep Training Sessions Short

A dog’s attention span is even shorter than a human’s. Educational psychologists have found that school children tune out after about 45 to 50 minutes if they don’t take a break. A dog tunes out much earlier. For best results, keep your training sessions short, preferably 5 minutes or less.

6. Introduce New Skills Progressively

As your dog works through your training curriculum, introduce new skills progressively. Do not teach a new skill until the current one has been learned thoroughly enough that your dog can perform it ten times in a row without a mistake.

As your dog is mastering a skill, it’s also important to practice getting it to apply the same skill in different environments. Dogs don’t generalize the way people do, and what a dog might be able to do well in one context won’t come as easily in another. For instance, your dog might obey a sit command under normal conditions, but become more unmanageable when a stranger or another dog is around, or when you’re out at the park. To address this, practice giving your dog commands outside your training sessions, in a “live” situation while it’s distracted by something else. This will help you gauge how well your dog has internalized its training.

7. Use Alternate Rewards

If you always give your dog the same dog cookie or dry dog food as a reward, it can become too routine to be motivating, like eating the same thing every day. Using alternate rewards can spice up your dog’s diet and make it more excited about learning new tricks.

Experiment with different foods to find out what your dog likes. You can try things like boiled chicken, boiled hamburger, cooked hot dogs, freeze-dried liver, cereal, bagel pieces, cooked pasta, carrots, bananas, or dried fruit. Always check if a food is good for your dog first. Don’t give it too much of any one thing to avoid diarrhea.

Use toys and games as well as food for rewards. If your dog has a favorite toy, incorporate it into its training. Try different toys to see what your dog likes. Experiment with different games like fetch, tug, catch, and Frisbee to find out what gets your dog excited.

Be sure to mix up rewards randomly every so often. This will keep your dog eager to play in the hope of getting its favorite reward.

8. Keep Treats Small

When rewarding your dog’s behavior, it’s best to keep your dog’s treats small. This will make your treats last longer, giving you more training time per treat. It will also help keep your dog from getting overweight.

9. Use a Clicker for Reinforcement

You can only feed your dog so many treats at a time, but using a clicker for reinforcement opens up many additional opportunities to train your dog. A clicker is a small plastic box with a metal tab that emits a unique clicking noise when you press down with your thumb. By pairing the click with a food reward, you can train your dog to associate the noise with food. Your dog will then respond to the click as if it were food.

You can then take this a step further by placing the treat in a different location than the clicker and only going to get the treat after the dog has performed the desired behavior. This will train the dog to work for the click rather than the treat itself.

Once you have trained your dog to respond to the clicker, you can use the noise to communicate to your dog which behaviors are rewardable. Follow up the desired behavior with a click and a treat. Ignore undesired behavior. Your dog will work to perform the behavior that leads to the click.

After a dog can perform a behavior ten times in row without mistakes, it’s time to wean it off the clicker. Have the dog perform the behavior more than once before you reward it with a click and treat. This will encourage the dog to continue the behavior until it earns the reward. You can also substitute alternate rewards.

Be sure to always follow up the click with a treat, or the click loses its effectiveness.

10. Think Beyond Obedience

Like children, dogs learn through play more than through formal education. Think beyond obedience and structure your dog’s play as an opportunity for learning. Today there are classes not only for dog obedience but also for dog games and sports, such as trick classes, agility classses, fly ball, tracking, hunting, and herding. You can find many resources for this type of creative dog training online.

Worthy Creative Canine Training Resources

Humane Society Dog Care and Behavior Tips
Animal Planet Dog Guide
Dog Obedience Training from Petco