The Dog Blog

One of the basic techniques in training a dog to come is the use of a Long Line. Long Lines aren’t sexy, cool, cutting edge, or anything else. In fact long lines are probably one of the oldest training tools for working with dogs and, believe it or not, they are still one of the best.

When I get clients that want their dogs to have a good reliable Recall or “Come” command we spend a LOT of time with a long line. Strange, but most people find it incredibly difficult to work with a piece of rope 20 feet long. The dogs usually do fine, but the clients get tangled, wrapped up, and tripped up with long lines. The things are one of my favorite tools though. You simple can’t accomplish some things in dog training properly without the use of a piece of rope.

So, with all that said and done, here is a picture of one of my clients named Zimba working hard with his people in the park this morning on the long line. Good work Zimba and family. Thank you for doing your homework for me.

I did a post a couple of weeks ago about getting the dog to pay attention to you.

I’ve been lamenting the lack of comment on that post from my clients, but today I got this fantastic picture with the subject line “keeping an eye on the treats” which is how we went about teaching this pup to walk next to the person and watch. Needless to say, Zimba picked up on the lesson very well. Very well indeed from the looks of this picture.

Enjoy the photo and don’t you wish your dog had this level of concentration on you when out for a walk.

Zimba watching closely

Steve Haynes
Austin Dog Trainer
Fidelio Dog Works

Ahh the sweet smell of success. Kat Wilson and Tucker just passed the Canine Good Citizen Test today. The great news is that Kat is not actually Tucker’s owner but his daily dog walker and she did all the training with him! I can’t say how happy this makes me that Tucker has been getting not only walked on his daily outings but also trained quite well by Kat.

So, if you want your dog trained to pass the Canine Good Citizen test and you’ve got some business travel to do, I would suggest you contact Kat at Over the Top Pet Care.

Congratulations to you both!!

Steve Haynes
Austin Dog Trainer and certified Canine Good Citizen tester.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been getting to do more and more agility training. Now, I’m no agility specialist by any means but I do enjoy doing all of the basic work for it. Often times I’ll get clients to a very good base level of training by teaching the dog directions, target command, working on the “come command” (which is an absolute necessity in agility). After the dog masters these basics, I’ll usually send the clients off to an agility specialist if they want to compete or off to something like the Zoom Room here in Austin if they want to play around and have fun teaching their dog new things.

In all cases though, working with a dog by teaching them the basics of agility is a great way to engage their mind and get them to think about things in a new way. Anything that help a pup pay attention to their owner and gets them to anticipate what’s coming next is a plus in my book.

Steve Haynes
Austin Dog Trainer

Well, Since I’m on a dog photography jag at the moment, here is another of the Border Terrier pup downtown this week.

Well, Just a shot of a client’s dog at Zilker Park yesterday with the dew. Loved the way this one makes the park look like it’s in the middle of nowhere.

Steve Haynes
Austin Dog Trainer and part time dog photographer

One of the basic tenants of dog training is that the dog needs to pay attention to you before you can actually do any formal training. In my day to day work, it’s actually quite rare to find a dog that knows how to pay attention at a high level. This is a skill most trainers have to work on quite a bit before we can really start moving toward the goals most clients have for their dog.

What does “paying attention” actually mean in the dog world? Well, to keep it simple let’s just say that if your dog is looking at you it’s paying attention. Yes, that an over simplification and I admit it, but for the average client if we can teach the dog to look at them we’re well on our path to success.

So, when you think about your dog, does it watch and change directions with you when you alter your path with the pup on leash? Does it turn around and look at you when it gets a certain distance away when off leash, waiting for you to give it a direction? Does it swing by and check in on a regular basis when you are running around out in the woods? Most dogs don’t.

This attention issue is one of the reasons that most trainers start work with a leash in hand and start working on a skill called “loose leash walking”. It’s not complicated but it does take most dogs a while to actually get the hang of watching where the owner is in space when on the leash.

Now getting to this holy land of attention can be done in lots and lots of different ways. This is where real dog training differs significantly from Google dog training in that it’s impossible to figure out what technique will work best with any dog until we meet it and actually have the leash in hand. Those trainers that say you can solve every lack of attention issue with the same technique are nuts. But I will venture that every trainer would agree that to accomplish any meaningful training work with a dog, it will have to pay attention.

Up to this point I’ve talked a lot about attention but not how to improve it with your dog. Well, there is one small, simple technique that works with the vast majority of dogs from puppies to grown dogs. When you get home from work, throw a number of treats into your pocket and then start going about your normal activities. When you notice the dog watching you or moving around the house with you in a purposeful manner give it piece of kibble. Doing this very very simple exercise over and over will help train ‘attentiveness’ and will only improve how the dog performs in more distracting situations.

The little technique above absolutely will not solve all issues but it is a very very good start and is something any trainer worth their leash would ask you to do in the beginning of formal training.

Hope this helps but if you get the chance do whatever you can to help your pup learn attentiveness and all the training you do going forward will move much more smoothly.

Steve Haynes
Austin dog trainer
Fidelio Dog Works

People call me a pragmatic dog trainer. I’m flattered actually, but in some circles it’s meant as a slur. That’s ok, because what it really comes down to with me is helping people and their dogs have a better quality of life. Notice there that I said “people AND their dogs” not just the dogs and not just the people, that is a very important distinction about how we at Fidelio approach things.

Sometimes in my profession I run across situations that just amaze and confound me. This recent story is one of those.

I’ve got a client, a new client that called me a few weeks ago desperate because she was unable to walk her dog. She’d been working with another trainer for a number of sessions, and after 5, yep that’s right five, lessons she was still unable to walk her dog across the street without it yanking her injured shoulder to the point that it hurt. That’s a very bad situation with a high energy dog. This dog needed walking and it needed walking a LOT.

Well when I met with the client we talked for a few minutes about her health issues and the history of the dog, then it was time to go to work. Straight away when we clipped the leash onto the dog and it charged out the door and yanked hard on her owner. From what the owner told me, this was how every walk had been since she adopted the dog, and it’s also how the walks were with the previous trainer. Not a pretty site for the dog or the owner.

Now, I’m all for other trainers having a philosophy about dog training. That’s fine, but here is where the ‘pragmatic’ part of what I do comes into play. If that philosophy isn’t helping the dog, the owner, or the situation, it might be the wrong philosophy and it probably is time to change it. Unfortunately some trainers don’t or can’t look at things that way.

Once I touched this dog’s leash it took me exactly 20 seconds to get the dog walking properly without pulling, lunging, forging, or cutting in front of me. Within less than a minute the dog was managing a pretty decent heel position. I was flabbergasted about how another trainer had taken 5 HOURS thus far and hundreds and hundreds of dollars of lessons and not been able to get the dog to walk across the street peacefully with the owner? I didn’t really have to do anything special with this dog and certainly nothing that a first year trainer wouldn’t be able to do in their sleep. Also, I didn’t even have to use any special equipment or training collars with the dog to get it to perform.

By the end of the session the owner was walking the dog around the park in front of her house in a heel position passing other dogs with no issues and managing to move past the pesky squirrels that always elicited a strong lunge on the leash before. Now that, is improving someone’s quality of life and I’ll take my pragmatic approach any day over wasting hours and hours of time and hundreds of dollars on a failed philosophy of training.

Now, I don’t put myself or my company forward as some Super Trainer organization or anything like that. What I do believe is that we at Fidelio have the ability, skill, and training to look at the whole situation and do what is best for the dog AND the owner and get them to a better place in their lives in a pragmatic way.

Steve Haynes
Austin dog trainer
fideliodogs.com

The way I do dog training is a driving intensive endeavor. For the past few years I’ve driven around in a large Volvo wagon that I needed for hauling client dogs here and there but that part of the business has not been that important of late so it was time for a change.

On the average day I’ll drive about 100 miles between client meetings. Yep, I’m busy, and that’s a lot of drive time. To try to mitigate how much pollution I create doing my thing it was time to change vehicles. The new official vehicle of Fidelio Dog Works is not a not very sexy but super efficient Prius. We are saving many gallons of gas a day with this thing and it just makes us feel better about out not adding as many degrees of heat to the summer here in Austin. Just think of it as our way of keeping the dog’s feet just a bit cooler on the pavement during August.

Here’s to greener dog training.

Steve Haynes
Austin Dog Trainer
Fidelio Dog Works

My apologies to clients that have viewed the blog over the past couple of weeks. We had a server migration and things of course, didn’t go as smoothly as we would have liked. The blog has been in bad shape but we’re working on it. Hopefully the house will be in order shortly and you can get back to perusing my warped view of the world of dog training.

All my best, and thank you for your patience.

Steve Haynes

Wow! I ran across this on youtube today and sat there for the whole time just completely enthralled. Anyone that works with “field” dogs will find this great fun to watch. Particularly if you like the “English” breeds of cockers, setters, and springers. Worth the 9 minutes or so to take a look.

Here it is:

Had a strange meeting with a client today. Their dog who is now over a year old and who I trained initially has developed a habit that his family thinks is unsettling.

It seems that the pup spends most of the day with the mom of the house, and while she is a great lady and a very dedicated dog trainer she is a bit of a perfectionist. Well, when the dad of the house comes home the pup goes nuts and wants to spend all the time with him. This, as you can imagine with a bit of a perfect mother, was unsettling.

Their question to me was “how do we make the dog like me [the husband] less and like her [the mom] more??” Simple actually. As with many things in life, familiarity breeds contempt. I told them to switch roles for a few days and let the dad do the walking, training, grooming, feeding… and let the mom do the come home and play thing. It should be an interesting experiment.

Now, while nothing in dog training is absolutely certain, I’ll bet a heavy wager that by the end of the week the pup will be following the mom around going “play with me, play with me, play with me” at every opportunity.

Hopefully, problem/issue solved

Many days I spend my time running between clients in the car and saying “sit”, ‘Down’, ‘come’ over and over…. all day. It’s not a bad way to spend a day, in the company of dogs and their people devoted to them, but it’s nice to once and a while get to work with a dog that will actually a have a job that it has to do. Particularly, an important job. Yesterday was one of those days.

Dr. Gordon, a psychiatrist at Ft. Hood military base here in Texas is going to be taking his dog Lady to work with him. Dr. Gordon works with returning soldiers with PTSD and he’s found that having a dog in the room helps everyone deal with the difficult conversations and situations. That’s good for the people for sure, but that’s only half the story.

Lady, the dog, was found abandoned in a ditched car in the parking lot of the local hospital. No one knows how long she was locked in the car or anything at all about her history. All we do know is that Dr. Gordon rescued her and has been training with her since she landed with him. It’s a good match, probably the best match I’ve seen in a while.

So, long story short, Lady passed her Canine Good Citizen test yesterday and is now cleared by the Ft. Hood staff to accompany Dr. Gordon to the hospital and on all of his rounds with clients anywhere on the base. A true working dog!

Needless to say, I was pretty proud of both of them and I’m not shy to say that I had a tear in my eye when they walked away with their CGC certificate to head straight back to Ft. Hood to a group session with the soldiers.

When a dog trainer (like me) starts looking for a puppy, I tend to start looking for English Cocker puppies.

This is a lovely ECS at 4 weeks old. Oh my.

Sometimes we dog trainers use this saying amongst ourselves to describe a predicament a certain client is in. We’ll say “It’s too much dog for him/her” Which really means that the dog is the equivalent of giving your 87 year old grandmother a Ferrari to drive to the market on Thursdays.

Often times this “too much dog situation” involves much care and attention from the trainer and much destroyed furniture, toys, house siding…on the part of the owner.

One of my most recent favorite Near “too much dog” stories involves this dog Ranger. Ranger came from a very high end breeding program that breeds for serious working dogs. He is a VERY high quality dog with excellent intelligence, maybe to much. Ranger’s owner is a previous client of mine and a very fine lady. She’s had Shepherds before so she knew what to expect. Well, she almost knew what to expect. This pup needed TONS of exercise both mental and physical and he was a bear to keep up with. So, while I can say he’s a handful and got near “to much dog”, his owner stepped up and managed to keep him at the ” all the dog I can handle” level.

So, as a tribute to this owner and Ranger, I took some photos of him today to show what a great dog he’s become. Kudos to Patti and Ranger for getting over the hump and moving on out into the world of fantastic companionship.