Zak George's Guide to a Well-Behaved Dog

by Zak George

  9. I cannot stress this next point enough: this type of training should be done for months and tested over and over again before you try to take your dog’s leash off in a real-life situation. You’ll want to know that your dog listens while off leash (but in a variety of fenced, secure environments) in the morning, afternoon, and evening; after eating breakfast; on days when she’s feeling extra-energetic; and on days when she’s less enthusiastic about training. All moods, all conditions, all of the time. You want to be as certain as possible that your dog isn’t going to run away when you, say, take her on a hike without her leash on. It’s just not worth the risk.

  10. Not all dogs will excel at off-leash training, and progress might be very slow for some, especially those high-energy dogs. These dogs tend to be ultra-curious about their world, so it takes a special commitment to get them to this higher level of training. It’s not for lack of intelligence, but rather due to their love of life! However, with appropriate exercise just before training sessions, they are far more likely to succeed. Also keep in mind that some dogs will never be okay off leash, and that’s fine, too. Only you will know when the time is right to let your dog off leash in certain situations, if ever.

  HANDLING CHASING CARS

  If your dog is chasing cars, you are a long way off from off-leash training. Instead, your focus needs to be on basic training on leash in the presence of cars for an extended period of time, depending on your dog’s progress. If your dog is highly reactive to cars, then begin in slow traffic areas. Focus on practicing your dog’s general training routine with cars in the distance. Assuming your dog listens well here, work up to doing desensitization and counterconditioning exercises in the presence of more significant traffic. As cars become less enticing simply due to frequent exposure, and as you reinforce good behavior with rewards when your dog does react well, you’ll be closer to getting your dog to listen to you reliably. Don’t rush this process. And remember, of course, that dogs should never really have access to moving cars no matter how well they’re trained. For more on this, see my video Train Your Dog to Stop Chasing and Lunging at Cars: Where to Start.

  HANDLING RUNNING AWAY

  A lot of dogs like to bolt out the front door whenever you open it. This is a scary, dangerous habit—one you’ve got to nip in the bud right away. Dogs quickly learn that the moment your hand goes toward the doorknob they are about to gain access to the outdoors. For some dogs, you might notice that even grabbing your keys tips them off that the door is about to open. I have great videos on YouTube that walk you through getting your dog to stay when you open a door leading to the outside, such as How to Stop Your Dog from Running Out of the Front Door! Stay While Distracted. Graci the Portuguese Water Dog was my guest in that video—she had lots of energy and the most inviting personality. Her training session and results were very typical of what most people can expect in just one or two lessons. I also have some basic advice on how to handle this:

  1. First, be sure that your “stay” training is very solid during your primary training and surprise primary training sessions. See this page, chapter 3, for a refresher on teaching this skill.

  2. Next, practice “stay” at various doors leading to the outdoors, but keep your dog on leash and take special care to keep her from running out of the door. Remember, start very, very small. Tap the doorknob with your finger for a second and reward if your dog stays. If not, take a step back and practice basic “stay” training under conditions that are easier for your dog (such as nowhere near the front door). Repeat this exercise five or six times.

  3. If all goes well, ask for a sit or a down and a stay, and grasp the doorknob for a second or two. Don’t turn it yet. Acknowledge your dog’s successful stay and reward accordingly.

  4. Next, wiggle the doorknob briefly while encouraging a “stay” and reward. Work up to cracking the door open a centimeter and for a brief moment. Close the door. Then work up to being able to keep the door open for just a couple of seconds. Close the door and reward your dog for learning this life-saving skill.

  5. Once your dog holds a thirty-second stay with the door open (and on leash), phase in the distraction training outlined in chapter 19. Start small and work up to more challenging sessions. The major variable change here is that the door is open. Whenever changing a variable (such as adding an open door to the mix), keep everything else as easy as you can for your dog at first and prioritize reinforcing the behavior you are there to teach. In this case, that’s staying at the door. Gradually, make these training drills more elaborate. For instance, throw distractions outside while you ask for a “stay.” Use a combination of food, toys, and other temptations to “proof” your training. If your dog holds a “stay” when you throw her favorite toy or bits of chicken out the front door, she’s more likely to stay when the door is open in real life and there aren’t major distractions.

  Needless to say, it’s extremely important that you control the environment flawlessly here. You are not guaranteed that your dog will be safe or that you will get her back if you let down your guard and she runs out the front door. In short, make sure that your dog does not ever have the opportunity to slip out of the door. This skill is so important that I recommend you do these training exercises extremely often over two months or more. If you make this a priority to teach, your dog will have this concept down pat quickly.

  CHAPTER 22

  NOT LISTENING WITHOUT TREATS

  A logical question a lot of people ask me is, “Do I always have to use treats and other rewards?” As you know by now, teaching a dog how to behave in a variety of different situations and places is a fairly in-depth process. So, while you may not have to reward liberally forever, you do need to use rewards longer than you might think. Remember that every time you change a variable on a dog (for example, the environment), this is very likely to make the training exercise more difficult since the conditions surrounding the training experience have changed. Rewards are what help you efficiently communicate with your pet in all sorts of places and situations.

  To be extra-clear, let’s just recap this point: don’t assume that just because your dog picks up on something like “leave it” in a single training session or two that that means he knows how to leave things alone in all other situations. Real dog training requires contextual training in specific conditions, both set up and organic, over a significant amount of time—certainly throughout the first year of training, regardless of your dog’s age, and longer if you continue to teach him newer, more advanced concepts.

  Yes, it’s necessary to dole out lots of praise, rewards, and fun around the most basic proper behaviors for a while. However, as your dog matures and learns, you don’t have to emphasize rewards for basic things as those behaviors become second nature.

  Think about coaching an experienced thirteen-year-old baseball player versus a seven-year-old beginner player. For the veteran player, you would have higher expectations and not focus on praising every little success during easier aspects of the game. For instance, if the seven-year-old fields an easy grounder, you’d probably cheer and shout and say something like, “Great job!” If the older child made the same play, you might not even cheer at all since such plays are commonplace and even expected at that point. That’s what it’s like teaching dogs!

  In this chapter, I’ll go over some key things you need to know about how often to reward your dog at first during primary training sessions and how to gradually get your dog to listen to you reliably even when not being rewarded.

  WHY DON’T DOGS LISTEN WITHOUT TREATS AND OTHER REWARDS?

  You can’t expect a dog who receives a treat every single time you ask for a particular behavior to continue that behavior when you suddenly stop giving rewards cold turkey. I’m not saying you’ll have to use rewards forever, but you’ve got to wean your dog off of them gradually. This is the concept behind intermittent reinforcement, which I’ll cover later in this chapte
r. However, before I get to that, it’s critical to understand the importance of finding the right rate of reinforcement during each training session. Doing that, in turn, helps you determine exactly when you need to use rewards and when you can get by without them.

  THE IMPORTANCE OF THE RATE OF REINFORCEMENT

  The rate at which you reward your dog is a super-important variable during any given training session. When it comes to the rate of reinforcement, I’m talking about how rapidly you reward a dog for a certain behavior within an individual training lesson. Let’s say you are teaching your dog to stay while you walk away from him. At first, you’ll need to back away just a foot or two, and then rush back and reward your dog. But that doesn’t mean that the training session is over. You now want to seal this behavior in and heavily reinforce it while your dog is paying attention. In other words, repeat this several times in a row in fast succession—maybe five repetitions in twenty seconds. You are literally trying to get in as many reps as possible, so there should be some hustle to your method just after you begin to achieve initial progress on something new. These rapid-fire rewards in fast succession might look like over-rewarding to the novice. However, there is a method behind this madness, and that is a very conscious, deliberate effort to imprint desired behavior in your dog. (That’s why I recommend using very tiny, high-quality treats like real meat!) This liberal rewarding style is particularly valuable when introducing new concepts or for when you need to take a step back and repair a once reliable behavior. It’s also critical anytime you change a variable in your training, like asking your dog to stay at a park he’s never been to before.

  As your dog’s behaviors such as “sit,” “stay,” and proper leash walking become habits, slow the rate of reinforcement down a bit. For example, you might find yourself only rewarding twice on a one-hour walk with your dog in the later stages of your leash walking training, whereas at first you may be rewarding every few seconds. Understanding the cadence and rhythm of rewarding your dog is something that comes with time, but remember that the newer or more difficult something is, the faster your rate of reinforcement should be. The more reliable the behavior becomes, the slower your rate of reinforcement.

  Be flexible when it comes to determining the rate during an individual training session. Sometimes your dog may be frustrated, and you need to make things more enjoyable. In such a case, up your rate of reinforcement. Other times you may have incredible momentum on something and you suspect you can get by with a slower rate of rewarding. That’s fine, too! It’s important that you carefully reconsider the speed at which you reward during every lesson. You’ll see lots of examples of this in my videos on YouTube.

  WHAT TO DO WHEN YOUR DOG DOESN’T LISTEN WITHOUT TREATS OR OTHER REWARDS

  So when can you wean off treats and other rewards? That’s where intermittent reinforcement comes into play! Here’s the concept:

  1. When first teaching something new or changing up a training condition, reward your dog almost 100 percent of the time he’s successful. However, as your dog starts to get the hang of things, lower your rewards to 70 percent; then during another training session, drop it down to 40 percent. Then, maybe up your rewards to 50 percent. Doing so will likely make behaviors more reliable moving forward—in fact, the science behind intermittent reinforcement is strong.1 It’s this same type of learning that makes things like gambling and video games so addictive—you only succeed sometimes and that, in turn, makes you more likely to continue to participate and become even more determined. When teaching your dog, the goal is to keep things just interesting enough to keep him really engaged. The less able your dog is to decipher a pattern in when you reward and the more uncertain he is as to whether or not he will receive a reward, the more likely he is to do what you are asking.

  2. While your dog is new to learning how to behave in the world, it’s so important to go out of your way to provide great outcomes to desired behaviors and to do so very often. It’s a little difficult to say exactly when you don’t need to reward as it is such a subtle, gradual process. However, as your dog starts doing his basics more and more reliably, then you are on track to begin phasing out rewards in day-to-day training.

  3. Should you ever get rid of treats altogether? Well, that kind of depends on the behavior. In my experience, I don’t see that it’s necessary to reward on basic behaviors forever, unless you want to do so. If you’ve done a good job of rewarding for the first year of training, then these basic behaviors should be pretty reliable. In the case of my dogs, I still frequently reward them for tricks and more advanced behaviors. My advice is to experiment using varying rates of reinforcement and intermittent rewarding according to your dog’s success with a particular skill and adjust these factors based on your dog’s progress over time. In the way that parents still reinforce their love and pride for their grown children by giving them presents on their birthdays, picking up the check at a restaurant, and praising their new job promotion, so too is it a good idea to give your dog extra rewards for consistent good behavior periodically and well into adulthood. I suspect, though, that most of you are very likely to do this without my advice. Dogs are so authentic and genuine that it’s hard not to let them know how much we appreciate them throughout their lives.

  CONCLUSION

  You probably bought this book because you wanted greater insight into how to better understand your dog and to learn how to teach her right from wrong. Your dog might have a particular issue like barking, play biting, or chewing that you want to stop immediately. Or maybe your dog has started showing aggressive behaviors, and you want to nip them in the bud before they escalate any further. The good news is that the very fact that you read this book shows that you care—and having that loving relationship with your dog is the critical foundation that will help you work through any issue.

  I hope that through this book, I’ve managed to help you keep your expectations in line with reality. Remember, just as with humans, no dog is perfect. Sure, dogs are super-intelligent and very capable of extra-ordinary things, but they’re not robots. I’ve known some pretty incredible dogs in my life, but every single one of them had little quirks. My first dog, Venus, is a great example of this—she was brilliant and phenomenal in so many ways. However, she was also always scared of thunderstorms and never very social with other dogs or people. And that was perfectly fine. In fact, if you ask me, I think dogs’ imperfections are what make them so lovable and charming. Sure they’re goofy and overly enthusiastic at times, and they can certainly be a little sneaky, too. That’s what makes them so irresistible!

  Also, I hope you’ve learned that you need to train your dog as you want her to behave. You may find that there are certain behaviors that don’t bother you so much, like digging or jumping on you when you come home. Ultimately, you are the one who needs to decide what you are okay with. If you don’t mind your dog jumping on the furniture, that’s fine! If digging in the backyard doesn’t bother you, that’s fine, too! There are no rules other than the ones you want your dog to learn to follow (and those protecting the safety of your dog and other animals and people, of course!).

  Keep in mind that some issues take longer to address than others, and some dogs learn faster than others. But after balancing all of these factors, remember that nobody knows your dog like you do and nobody is better equipped to teach her than you! As you work through your dog’s behavioral issues together, pick your battles as you would with a child and prioritize the training that you think is most important at that time. Trying to take on too much too quickly only leads to frustration between you and your dog, so stretch out that training time accordingly and always enjoy it. Remember that any progress is fantastic!

  My first three dogs—Venus, Supernova, and Alpha Centauri—have sadly passed on, but I can now reflect on their lives and all of the training I did with them over the years. What I’ve come to realize is that while it may have felt at times that I
was doing all the teaching, the biggest lessons were actually the ones that I learned from my dogs. I admire their genuine, lifelong innocence. I’m amazed at how they never dwelled on mistakes and envious of how they really seemed to live their lives to the fullest. Even simple pleasures like chewing a bone or playing a game of fetch or chase appeared to bring them so much happiness.

  However, it was their ability to love unconditionally that gets me the most. Dogs never hesitate to show you just how much they care about you. They’re always loyal. So, regardless of how hyper, loud, or annoying your dog might be from time to time, I’m sure you’ll agree that the trade-off is so worth it as there’s nothing quite like being the recipient of a dog’s affection, friendship, and love. Dogs make our lives richer. We are better because of them.