The Dog Blog

I’ve had a lot of people pay me a lot of ways over the years, but one of today’s clients did it up right!

Here’s the setup:

A great golden retriever puppy that is 14 weeks old.
A very cool client family with 2 kids which are fantastic and work a lot with the puppy.
A lot of hard work done over the last three weeks training with the puppy.

So, after the lesson today the Mrs. says “hey, we need to pay you for the lessons, let me get the checkbook” and walks inside the house. When she comes back outside Stella (the puppy) runs over to her on the front porch and waits while she writes the check. After she finishes signing everything she rips the check out, hands it to the puppy and yells at me to call Stella over. One quick “Here” command and Stella flashes across the yard to bring me the check! No chewing, no slobber, no running off with a multi-hundred dollar check, just straight to me in that wonderful Golden Retriever “I’m doing the right thing” way. Amazing.

Now, I ask you, is that a well trained puppy or not?

So, if I can have a wonderful ending to any Monday I think this would be it. A Golden puppy running across the yard bringing me a check. That makes today a VERY good day indeed.

Steve Haynes
A very PROUD Austin dog trainer
Fidelio Dog Works
www.fideliodogs.com

Proof of the power of Place command

Well, this is proof of what can happen.

This puppy, a full bore border collie was chasing the poor cats around like crazy in the house before he learned the place command. The cats were getting a bit fed up, the people were getting a bit fed up and well, the puppy was just doing what puppies do…. which is wreak havoc.

After working on the command for about 30 minutes, this little bit of peaceful coexistence came about. Can you say happy dog/cat owner or what?!

And, just to toot my own horn a bit, here is the email I got from the owners a couple of days after the lesson.

—————
Steve,

Thank you SOOOO much!!!! I think Monty had a great time with the lessons (yay treats!). He is certainly having fun practicing with us!

We were so impressed with you that we are telling all of our friends who have dogs about you. Thank you for being so helpful and friendly…we are eternally grateful! We’ll keep you updated on his progress!

Brittany, Scott, and Monty

—————–

Once again, Place command saves the day!

Steve Haynes
Austin Dog Trainer
www.fideliodogs.com

Here are the basics:

 One nine month old daughter that started walking two weeks ago.

One Welsh Springer spaniel that needs MORE JOBS!

One very tired dog trainer daddy that spends all day standing around with dogs.

What’s a dog trainer to do?

When you add all of these things together there’s just one answer that makes sense.  Teach to spaniel to go get my daughter when she ventures to far away or, as is more often the case, ventures toward the "danger zone" of whatever it is on the playground, house, yard, or deck.

We started off getting Gwennie, the spaniel, to go over and touch Iris when I asked "where’s Iris".  After I startd this I though it would be a good idea to break it into two commands.  "Where’s Iris" means just take me to her.  Then I started adding "Get Iris" which means that I want Gwennie to go find Iris (usually not to terribly far away) and to gently "herd" her back in my direction.  We’re still working on the "herding" part but things are going well and I should have it in another week or two.

Now, with all that being said another though has popped into my mind, and that is my daughter will have wonderful stories to tell her therapist when she older about how her dad trained the family dog to "fetch" her.

Like I said, I’m a lazy guy so…..

Steve Haynes
Austin Dog Trainer
Fidelio Dog Works
www.fideliodogs.com 

This post is a little delayed but I had so much fun at this lesson I just had to get it in here.

Last week I was working with a fantastic client who has a six month old Great Dane named Lola. Lola is a wonderful 106 pound puppy that is very well trained and walks around Town Lake with her owner off leash.

The thing is, the owner wanted Lola to tell her when she wanted to go out. So, off we went to dog training work. Lola had a small bell like the kind you see in movies on the hotel counter. The kind you slam down and the little bellhop jumps up from behind the desk. We though we would do the same thing with Lola and her owner.

Initially, I started teaching Lola to touch the little ringer with the tip of her nose, and while she was doing very well at that she had other more efficient ideas. Very soon (within about 15 minutes of working) Lola figured out that she could hit that bell A LOT harder using her foot, and once she really put together that ringing the bell with her foot got more treats and tons more excited laughter out of myself and her owner she started doing it repeatedly. Over and over and over and over again. Montana, the owner and I were just laying on the floor rolling in laughter and Lola’s new found skill and understanding of what we were asking us to do. At one point neither of us could talk we were laughing so hard while the bell went DING, DING, DING.

Loads of fun and a new skill for Lola the very large puppy.

Steve Haynes
Austin Dog Trainer
Fidelio Dog Works

But this is certainly something I haven’t encountered before.

I was visiting with someone tonight and in the course of the conversation they told me they had a dog that could climb trees. Well, I thought it would run out and kind of bounce up and down next to the trunk or something but when Kelly let his dog Dolly out she ran straight for the tree and actually started CLIMBING. Dolly used her head and neck to brace herself between branches so that she could go higher. Amazing. She was at least 15 feet up in the tree before she slowed down!

Kelly said that when he’s out hiking with her she’s always looking for trees to climb and any of them that look possible she’s off and climbing.

Never ceases to amaze me what the little four legged critters can do.

Steve Haynes
Austin Dog Trainer
Fidelio Dog Works

Being a dog trainer, I’m always on the lookout for places your dog can visit with you. I also keep an eye out for places you CAN’T take your dog, and I make it my mission to convince those places otherwise.

Early every Saturday morning my wife and I go to an organic farm here in Austin to grab our veggies for the week. For the past several years I’ve noticed that they had a subtle but noticeable no dogs sign flying. I’ve meant to several times but something has always come up and I never got around to it. Well today I got my answer.

On the farm they have a nice flock, herd, kettle, whatever you call it, of chickens that lay the eggs we buy every weekend. Many times some of the chickens are out roaming around the farmstead scrounging for veggies that careless shoppers have dropped. Well, come to find out, the owner Carol Ann told me that chickens can literally die of fright and nothing scares them like a dog (a bit overly fox like I guess). Hence the no dog sign.

Well, being a good open minded dog trainer, and loving the fresh eggs from the farm, I guess I’m not going to try to convince her to let the pups show up.

Steve Haynes
Austin Dog Trainer
Fidelio Dog Works

Technorati Tags: Organic Farm

I get this one all the time…..You Train Dogs for a living?? Are you serious?

What exactly does that mean? Well, I kind of thought today would be a good day to just run through what I did with clients all day long. It was an average day though a little short for most, this one was only eight hours long (just like the old office job). But, I tell all my clients and friends, it sure beats the heck out of working in a cube all day long.

So, here goes:

First Client:

A 16 week old labrador retriever puppy from very fine blood lines. Her parents were field trial champions so we can assume that she’s a pretty high strung and ACTIVE puppy.

In any case, her owners have done a remarkable job on working with her on the basic obedience stuff (sit, down, come…) but they were having a problem with the crate training. This little girl just didn’t want to go in the crate and certainly didn’t want to stay in the crate. She was also showing some signs of separation anxiety in the mix.

Off we go to the crate. We work for almost a solid hour on getting her to run in the crate, sit down, lay down in there and basically calm down in the crate. We used several little dog trainer tricks (Treats!!!!) to accomplish this, but we also showed her that we weren’t going to leave her in there forever. She started getting the idea and her owner called later in the afternoon to tell me that the pup had actually taken a nap in the crate which was a first.

The we started working on the Bed command where we teach her to stay on a dog bed until released. This worked like a charm in the lesson and it’s the tool of choice for initial and low level work on separation anxiety. Great command for all dogs to learn but particularly with this girl.

Off to the next client:

Second Client:

Young Corgi that was about 1 year old and showing pretty pronounced fear symptoms. This dog had been subjected to another trainer that tried to yank it into doing stuff with a choke collar. Not the way to go with a scared dog and I would love to get that choke collar on the previous trainer but that’s another story.

Anyway, we spent the better part of an hour building up trust with the pup so that the owners could even catch her. We started playing some very calm training games using treats to get her to come to us and allow us to reach out and touch her collar. She did great and her two young owners (age 9 and 10) were fantastically patient. By the end of the session we had her outside and she would come to us from several feet away. Another first for the owner.

Off to the next client:

Third client:

A one year old Chesapeake Bay Retriever with a counter surfing habit and the turbocharged desire to jump in the pool every time the back door to the house was opened.

First we worked on the “snatch the food” habit.

Interesting story here. The kids that own this dog go to a school that send home bread with them every Friday. So every Friday this dog knocks the five year old down when he comes through the door and snatches the bread. Not a very good habit in a dog if you ask me.

I appropriated the loaf of bread in question, which didn’t get snatched this week, and we started to work. I unceremoniously dropped the Challah bread on the floor ( I hope that didn’t horribly violate some sacred Jewish tradition) and started to teach this guy that he just wasn’t going to get that lovely Jewish delicacy ever again. It worked. By the end of the session I could hold the Challah up and our old bread snatching buddy would move away from it as I held it closer to him.

Next we went to the pool. This one is a hard one. Chesapeake Bay’s are bred, born, selected, and ordained to jump in any body of water that presents itself. Anything from a thimble to a water bowl to the backyard pool. I mean, we’re working with genetics here, I’m not the dog Whisperer or anything.

After a bit of modifying how this guy approached the pool we managed to get him to sit unattended at the edge of the pool and actually turn away from it as the owners walked up to him. I kind of took it as all in a days work but the owners said they wouldn’t have believed it if I told them it could happen.

Now for the hard part:

Just because I worked with all those people today and got their dogs to DO what they wanted, those dogs are still not trained. It’s going to take hundreds and hundreds of repetitions for all of these folks to get where they want to go with their dogs. It’s grunt hard work.

The beautiful thing about what I do though is I get to come in, show them how to accomplish it, and usually get their dog to a better place. They they get to do all the hard work!

Thats a day in my life.

Steve Haynes
Austin Dog Trainer
Fidelio Dog Works

Technorati Tags: dog training, Dog Trainer

Every dog needs a job, and I really don’t believe they are happy unless they have one.

I got a call from one of my clients last night in which she described the most wonderful job for her dog.  Betsy, my client, is a BUSY woman.  She has three small children and a major league corporate gig.  Over the past few months the idea that her dog needed a job has been nagging at her so she finally came up with a most elegant solution that involved the kids with the dog and a clean house.

 Betsy, being the every dog loving person she is remembered that she had a backpack in her garage that one of her previous dogs used to carry things while she hiked in her days before momhood.  Trying the pack on her new dog she got the idea to have her pup wear the bag around the house every evening while the kids picked up their scattered toys in every room and loaded them into the pack.  The house gets cleaner as the kids follow the pup through the house toward the toy chest where everything is unloaded and stowed until the next day. 

Voila’ the dog has a job, the kids have fun with the dog, and Betsy gets a clean house every night.  What more could a dog want than such a wonderful job.

Steve Haynes
Austin Dog Trainer
Fidelio Dog Works
www.fideliodogs.com 

I get people all the time that tell me I must really enjoy my life.  They think hanging out with dogs all day long is just heaven compared to their corporate gig they do from their cube under fluorescent lights.

When I first started training full time I felt pretty odd telling people what I did for a living.  I was still in the mindset of my corporate days, and just felt strange saying "I’m a dog trainer."  Slowly but surely I started realizing that every time I told anyone what I did they would invariably say "how cool" or something like that and launch into questions.  This phenomena really peaked last night at my first Christmas party of the season.  

I was attending a corporate function (it’s name shall remain anonymous), the kind I went to over and over in my business days. But last night every time I met someone at the party and told them what I did we managed to get into an interesting conversation.  This hardly ever happened in the old days when I told folks I was in sales!  You tell someone you are a dog trainer though, and all of their nervousness and pretense drops away, they just start talking, asking questions, and generally open up.  It’s why I got into training to begin with.  Everyone loves to talk about their dog and what it’s up to.

Most people know about the study that shows how dogs reduce people’s blood pressure when present, but I’m starting to believe that just talking about dogs with people does the same thing.  I can’t prove it, but I certainly saw a major change in people last night at the party when they asked me "what do you do" and the words dog trainer came out of my mouth.

Steve Haynes
Austin Dog Trainer
Fidelio Dog Works
www.fideliodogs.com
512.231.8095

Temple Grandin is an amazing lady.  She has a gift that allows her to see things as animals do in many circumstances which puts her on a different level than the rest of us.

 As a dog trainer I run across odd things now and again that require me to actually sit down and think like a dog.  This happened last week and I thought it was interesting enough to write about and something others might find helpful.

I’ve been working with a client whose dog was refusing to use their dog door.  This isn’t that unusual for dogs newly faced with a dog door but this pup had been going in and out of a different doggie door for several years.  It turns out that the owner had recently replaced their house door and put in a shiny new doggie door for this pup which it wouldn’t have ANYTHING to do with, it wouldn’t even put it’s nose to the door when I got there. 

This just didn’t make sense.  Most dogs would have some trepidation about going out a new door but it was almost like this dog had "forgotten" how to open it and that just didn’t square with how intelligent this dog was in other areas.  After sitting down for a few minutes and looking the doggie door over, I thought back to something Ms. Grandin said in one of her books about animals and shiny things.  This dog door had a small shiny edge on the bottom of the plastic flap that stood out.  We grabbed some painters tape and covered over the shiny part and within five minutes we had the dog jumping through the door and pushing the flap up himself.  Amazing!  Something that simple had kept this pup from going outside for weeks and weeks.

Moral to the story is, sometimes all the dog training in the world won’t help you, but cutting out the glare from the shiny stuff will.

Steve Haynes
Austin Dog Trainer
Fidelio Dog Works
www.fideliodogs.com
512.231.8095 

I ran across this  article on dog waste in the NY Times this morning.  And though I’m a big advocate of picking up after the pups when they go on the neighbor’s yard, I do think the Freakonomics folks took this one a little far into the Orwellian netherworld.

Still,  I can pretty much assure you that I would pick up EVERYTHING if this ever went into effect.

Worth the read at the very least.   http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/02/magazine/02freak.html

Steve Haynes
Austin Dog Trainer
Fidelio Dog Works
www.fideliodogs.com

The things I get asked to do as a dog trainer never cease to amaze me, and that’s what makes doing this so wonderful.  Every time the phone rings or the email client pings I know it’s going to be something interesting.

A few weeks ago a former client of mine that runs and executive training business called to ask if I would do a short session with a group he was bringing into town.  I’ll admit I was interested but had no idea what he might have in mind.  Did he want to put the CEO of a Fortune 500 company on a leash and let me "train him/her"?  At least I knew enough to sit tight and wait to hear what he had in mind….and it was interesting.

 He wanted me to bring a dog that had very little training to the session and he wanted the group of executives to draw a command from a bag and have each of them try to get the dog to do the command within 60 seconds and using no force.  Interesting concept to say the least.  We brainstormed a bit about this and decided that most of these folks wouldn’t even be able to get the dogs attention much less get them to do the command.  What he wanted to show them was how you have to use different techniques to get the dogs attention and then find what it will work for to do the command.

Well, suffice it to say the show went very well.  I was surprised that some of these folks could get the pup to do some work for them but others had to wait until the great motivator showed up (the treat bag) before they could manage a down or a come to them.

All in all it was great fun and I hope that all of these Senior VP’s of this company came away with a little kernel of knowledge that will make their subordinates lives a bit more pleasant and productive.

Now for the kicker, the dog I used was that same Brittany Spaniel that stayed with me a couple of weeks ago.  The dog did great, but more on that in the next post.

Steve Haynes
Austin Dog Trainer
www.fideliodogs.com
512.231.8095

Last weekend The New York Times Magazine had a fascinating article about how we treat our dogs today.  I recommend everyone take a look at this and just think about it for a while.  Like most things, there is some good stuff there along with a few things that I disagree with. 

I take issue with the authors idea that dogs should be "relegated to the basement and the back porch" but I do support her when she says that dogs should be expected to "earn their keep as retrievers and ratters".  I’ve always been an advocate of having a JOB for the dogs to do and I think that with that comes a better human-dog understanding.

Take for instance my dog Gwennie.  She is a beautiful thing, a lovely Welsh Springer that is four years old.  Gwennie is not the brightest dog in the world and she was a real bear to train when she was a puppy but she has two jobs that she does around the house and she does them very well.  First, and this is not very taxing, she is the pretty dog of the group.  She’s calm, pleasant, and pretty and is just the kind of dog you want to follow you everywhere.  I trained her to do that, follow me EVERYWHERE.  Second, Gwennie’s real job is to close the front door whenever we come inside.  She does this every time we come in and she loves doing it.  She’ll whip around after we go inside, check to see that all the other dogs are in, and then push the door closed with a nice satisfying shove.  It took her a while to learn this job but now that she knows it she can’t really settle in in the evening until she closed the door after us.

 Long digression there, but if you read the article you’ll see that the author doesn’t like how we make our pets "Prima-Donnas".  What I have to say there is that even Prima-Donnas have jobs they can do that make them better members of dog society.  Heck, if Gwennie can find a job, any dog can.

Steve Haynes

Austin dog trainer

Fidelio Dog Works

Austin, Tx.

512.231.8095 

Well, not all dogs live the life of the back yard, some not only have to be house trained but they also need to be trained how and where their potty is on their private jets.

This one isn’t new to me, I’ve dealt with clients that took their dogs on long trips in their planes before but the approach we took this time was a bit different.

Since my client was going to be flying for over 6 hours at a time and they had a young puppy we needed a solution to keep the dog from messing up the carpets on their Gulfstream. After running through the ideas about Wee pads (they smell and often leak) and the unpalatable idea of keeping the pup in it’s crate for that long a period, we started thinking about having some real live turf in the plane. Well, as luck would have it, there is a market for this idea and it’s already been done. There is a wonderful lady I found in Los Angeles (where else would she be) that designs boxes which hold squares of real live growing sod for use as puppy bathrooms. What genius. It seems that the movie and music A list have been successfully using these things for quite some time backstage, in their set trailers, and on their planes.

These sod boxes, accurately and appropriately called PoochPotties are a great idea for a couple of really neat reasons:

First, we generally want to teach puppies that pottying on grass is the only acceptable surface for releiving itself, and the PoochPotty does that by using real grass.

Second, once the grass in the PoochPotty is messed up enough (you know what I mean) you just yank it out, toss the piece(s) of sod, and drop in new ones. Your pup is always getting the reinforcement of potty training on reall grass. The cool thing about this is that PoochPotty will supply you with new sod if you live in L.A., New York, or Chicago, or have fresh grass waiting for you at whichever airport you set your plane down. Alas, here in Austin we’ll just be running down to the garden supply store to pick up some new pieces when we need them. Easy enough!

For my clients that are really having difficulty house training their pups I’m going to start recommending a PoochPotty for the more pedestrian use in the home. The idea that we can now associate grass with going to the bathroom while the pup is still in the family room is just too compelling for this dog trainer to pass up. Steve Haynes Austin Dog Trainer Fidelio Dog Works 512.231.8095