Obedience
Tricks and Tips
These lessons will be posted on an obedience page for easy access as well as in this posting...
Before we get started on teaching your dog more search and rescue skills lets go over some obedience tricks and tips that can help you control a hard to handle dog or teach a new puppy manners on a leash.
These tips and tricks can teach any dog how to behave on a leash in a few sessions.
These Obedience tricks
and tips are for you to use to teach your family dog to be a well mannered
member of your pack without having to attend an obedience training course.
These basic obedience
commands and lessons are intended to help teach you how to control and handle
your dog in order for you to train your pet to assist you during an
emergency.
If you have any problem
handling your dog or getting your dog to pay attention when you are training
search tactics then use these obedience lessons to teach your dog to pay
attention to you and to follow your directions.
I’m a firm believer in
following the Bloodhound and any other breed who is trailing naturally. For
this reason, I do not believe in obedience training trailing dogs but I do
believe that tracking and air scenting dogs should undergo obedience training.
The reason is that we
follow a trailing dog’s direction but a tracking dog follows our direction or
commands. (By now you should know the difference between a trailing dog and tracking dog, if not, go back to lesson 1)
Obedience training discourages a dog to run ahead and perform on
natural instincts that I want them to use to find a person.
Obedience training
teaches our dogs to pay attention to us, to look at us for what to do next and
I do not want my Bloodhound to depend on me to tell them where to go.
I want my
Bloodhound running ahead showing me where to go.
On the other hand, I do
want to tell my area search or air scenting dog, my German Shepherd, what area
to look in or which room to stay out of or to go into.
I teach these dogs how
to climb in and out of windows, up and down ladders and into tunnels so they
can get into rubble and debris to search for a person.
These air scenting dogs
need directions to perform the feats they are asked to do.
They undergo
obedience training before and during search training.
They constantly learn as
I do with each dog how to use their skills to achieve the swiftest most effective
results.
Remember
Dogs learn faster if
the lessons are short and to the point.
Training your dog twice a day for 15
minutes will bring better results then once a day for a longer time frame.
Dogs have short
attention spans; many dogs get bored quickly if the task is not exciting. Dogs
do not learn when they are bored.
Read the lesson about
collars before you do these lessons.
These lessons are done using either a flat
collar or a regular choke chain collar and 6 ft leash unless otherwise stated. Off leash dogs can learn from these lessons too with praise and encouragement.
These dog training tricks and tips are not the ordinary class room techniques you find in dog training books or classes. These tips and tricks are proven methods for handling a dog.
In order to train a dog, the exercises have to be repeated and rewarded time and time again.
No dog learns immediately, although I can get immediate results using these handling techniques, the dog has not learned the positioning I want. They have only been placed in the position I want through the use of the leash and my body movement.
Continued in the next post will be how to teach a dog to heel or walk nice on a leash without pulling. This dog handling trick is not known by many trainers and will stop a dog from pulling you on a leash.
