Your dogs' smiles are positive reinforcement for YOU!
How would you feel if, when you walked into a meeting at work and started to take a seat, the boss said, “Don’t sit there”—and added nothing else? Wouldn’t your anxiety level soar?
That’s how your dog feels when you tell her No and don’t tell her what Yes is. Your boss might say something like, “Sit anywhere else you want, but we need that seat for X.” Your dog needs it to be more concrete: Don’t sit there, sit here. Don’t do this, do that.
In fact, leave off the “don’t” part for even greater success. “No” is a very difficult command for a dog to follow. Provide an alternative to the behavior you don’t want.
A useful command to teach your dog is one that gets her into her “safe spot.” Then whenever she is doing something you don’t want her to do, you can say, “Go to your rug” (or whatever command you have chosen). You’ve given her a Yes instead of a No.
Whatever the problem, or whatever you’re trying to train, the secret is to reward the desired behavior and to ignore whatever the dog does that you don’t like. Even a seemingly negative command like “leave it” can be best trained in tandem with its positive opposite, “take it.”
In training sessions, you want to be absolutely clear in communicating what the desired behavior is. That’s where use of the word Yes or a clicker can be very useful. The Yes or the click marks the specific behavior. The dog might have done nine other things before she gets her treat, but she knows she’s getting the treat because of the thing she was doing when you said Yes or clicked.
See videos of:
- Using Yes in teaching a dog to sit
- Using the clicker in teaching an advanced skill—I even have a video where I inadvertently trained Sage to do something different from what I intended, so this video will also show you how to undo that kind of mistake
