Building a Relationship with Communication & Emotion with Derek Beckelman

Description

In this episode, Jerry Bradshaw and Derek Beckelman discuss:

Building a relationship of trust with your new dog, both pet and working.
Being consistent with the rules with your dog.
The emotional nature of dogs and handlers.
The clash between attention and anticipation.
Increasing the effectiveness of your communication with your dog.

Key Takeaways:

Using food, treats, or toys to motivate, especially in the early stages of building the relationship is not a bad thing. But you want to avoid becoming a treat dispensing robot.
There are two sides to training - classical and operant. You do not want to focus only on operant conditioning and forget about the aspects of classical conditioning that can help with your training.
Dogs will try to anticipate everything. We, as humans, fall into routines. These can clash and create conflict within the training.
Training can be frustrating. But the dog just wants to do dog things. You can't get mad at them for being a dog.
You have to pay attention to where your dog's head is at in any given moment. Sometimes they aren't listening, not because they don't want to, but because they cannot due to other circumstances.

"It's not up to me how quickly a dog makes progress. It's up to the dog. But as long as we're paying attention, and we're reading what the dog is trying to tell us is going on, we can make jumps and progress when they're ready. But you have to see it. You have to feel it, and that just takes experience." — Derek Beckelman

Get Jerry's book Controlled Aggression on Amazon.com

Episode References: