Ty The Dog Guy On The Daily

To start off, I know I haven’t been quite as “daily” as usual lately. There’s a reason for that, and I’ve made it the subject of this post! For the past week or so, my office manager has been on vacation down in Florida. He’s having a good time, which I’m glad about, but that also means that I’ve been taking over his duties. I’m not very good at administrative things like billing, answering phones, and sending emails—plus, it takes up a lot of my time. I just haven’t had an opportunity to do many of my normal activities.

Frequently, I chat with owners who are just beginning to think about getting their dog trained. One of the most common complaints is that their dog is chewing and peeing on the floor, but the owners don’t want to use a crate. Or perhaps the dog is destructive, but the owners don’t want to walk it for forty-five minutes a day Basically, they want the training, but they don’t want to have to work for it.

In today’s post, I want to address the problems that arise when we do things for ourselves rather than for our dogs. Without intending to offend anyone, I’d like to tell you about a conversation. Earlier today, I talked with a women who had a Belgian Malinois who was over a year old and very aggressive. Now, if you're at all familiar with the Belgian Malinois, you know that this breed shouldn't be owned by most people. These dogs are amazing; I’m a huge fan of the breed, and I’ve imported many of them from Europe over the years. But the majority of people shouldn't own them, in the same way that sixteen-year-old kids should not own Lamborghinis. These are well-built, amazing machines, but kids don’t have the experience or the ability to handle them correctly. Belgian Malinois are great dogs for protection training and for police and military work, but they’re not really suited for average pet ownership. They’re far too much.

In this post, I’m going to tell you something that will possibly make you angry. It tends to have that effect on people, whether I say it like a jerk or as sweetly as I can. I think that people react in this way because they have an emotional response to things that go against what they like to hear. Well, here’s that statement: your dog probably doesn't want to protect you. A lot of people swear up and down that their dog loves them and definitely wants to protect them. In most cases, the first element isn’t under question: dogs tend to love their owner. But you have to see things from the dog’s point of view. Just like you and I, dogs are interested in self-preservation. Humans do a lot of things based on certain moral codes, but might still ignore someone getting mugged in order to avoid danger. Dogs are the same. They’re interested in self-preservation, and because of that they don’t automatically have a desire to protect the people they live with. Many people say things like: “All right, then expla

Today, I want to write a little about getting your dog ready for Christmas. In my house, we’ve got the Christmas tree, stockings hung by the chimney with care, and all sorts of other Christmas gear. My wife has a blog that a bunch of people read, and this year a company asked her if they could decorate our house for free if she wrote about it. So we’ve got some awesome decorations. Every year around Christmas, people run into problems with their dogs. Stockings, packages, trees—they’re all an issue! Dogs will rip up the gifts, pee on the stockings, tear down the tree, and all other sorts of stuff. The solution to this is simple, because it doesn't require a ton of effort to get your dog to behave. Unfortunately, a lot of people change the variables in their home and don't think about their dogs. Think about the scientific process for a minute. We start with a baseline. If we want to test something, we change a variable and watch how the baseline changes. Most people bring a lot of stuff into their house a

Today I’m on the beach at Turtle Bay in Oahu, Hawaii, staying at a resort while I’m working with a client. I woke up at five o’clock and walked down to the beach to have a morning swim. Those who know me will know that I’m not a great sleeper, so waking up early isn’t a big deal. But going and doing something early is a big deal for me. Normally I’d just stay in bed and watch a movie, and try to go back to sleep. But I’m here in Hawaii for just a few days, and it’s unbelievably gorgeous here. Yesterday I went bodysurfing and boogie boarding with our client, which I never get to do back in Utah. As a family, we lived in Costa Rica for a time. I took advantage of the beach as often as I could, but now that we’re back in Utah I don't get to do that very often. So here I am waking up at five o’clock and getting down to the beach! That made me remember a time when dogs were like that for me. This is kind of a confession on my part. When I was a fourteen year old kid, I woke up every morning ready to train my

Right now I’m in Hawaii working with a client, and I wanted to write a post about what I call the translation period. This is something that’s on my mind today because I’m working with a client here who has a new dog. The dog came to them trained, but I need to work with them for a while and teach them how to handle the dog. We used to frequently get this question: “If the dog is already trained, then why do you need to show the owner how to do things?” This is a huge red flag in the training industry because there are service dog and protection dog training companies that will ship you your dog with a list of commands. We had someone local to us who had gotten a dog from a company in the Midwest that supposedly worked for seizures. They asked the company what the dog would do when the owner had a seizure. And the company said: “Oh, the dog will figure it out. Don’t worry!” I’ve seen the same when people buy protection dogs from Germany and ask how the dog will protect them. Oftentimes, the company just sa

Today I want to talk about something I call a “contextual repetition.” I’ve been thinking about a challenge that some of our clients have, and recently came up with that term to refer to it. A lot of people find that when they start training, they see big results in certain areas. But in other areas, it takes them longer to get the results and sometimes there is a little frustration. Perhaps their dog goes nuts when somebody rings the doorbell, or doesn’t immediately respond to aggression training. I’ve determined that the challenge lies in contextual repetitions. Let’s say you're teaching your dog to sit. You can teach this command in a few minutes, and you can get repetitions in easily around the house. You can get hundreds in the space of a week! As we all know, repetition is a big key to learning. So your dog might only take a few days or a week to learn “sit” or “lay down” if you work on it all the time. Yet the person whose dog learned “sit” quickly might become frustrated when someone rings the

In today’s blog post, I want to talk about being sick. This past week was Thanksgiving, and on Tuesday we flew out to visit my family in California. It’s a short flight, only about two hours, but I was stressed because we had to wake up at three in the morning. So I didn’t sleep the whole night. I sat up watching movies, afraid that if I fell asleep we would miss our flight. But I’m a thirty-six year old man, so I can’t really skip sleep anymore! I was exhausted the next day, and then I got on a plane with a ton of recycled air. And when I was at my parent’s house on the guest . Coming back, we had to get up early again to get to the airport in time. On top of everything, I’m working on stressful stuff with the business. A week of not sleeping well, flying twice, and some stress all added up. I started to feel sick, and woke up the next day in bad shape. This was a series of little events that left me sick. When you get sick, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what happened. Whether it’s a cold or cancer, it

Before I begin this post, I’d like to offer the disclaimer that I sincerely hope to not offend anyone. What I’m about to write is simply an observation I’ve made in my work. Over the years I’ve found that the most experienced “dog people”—whose who train dogs, handle dogs, or simply spend a lot of time with their dogs—have the least amount of “stuff” for their dogs. They don’t have a lot of toys, accessories, and gizmos. I can think of a handful of exceptions, but for the most part people that understand dog behavior don’t buy a billion things for their dog. That might seem counterintuitive at first, but it can be very important. While speaking with a group of dog trainers at work the other day, I noticed a common thread: phrases like “My dog has hardly toys” or “We barely have any of that!” In general, most of these trainers give their dogs only what they truly need. Oftentimes, when owners don’t give their dogs the leadership or structure they need, they nevertheless sense that their dog needs more.

As I write this, it’s cloudy and windy and chilly outside, and that means that soon we’ll start getting a certain type of call from some of our clients. Oftentimes, we train a dog in the spring or summer and have some great results in fixing aggression or house training. But sure enough, come the first cold spell, clients will call us with complaints like these: “My dog hasn’t gone to the bathroom inside in six months, but he just did!” “My dog’s starting to get mean again—what do I do?” What’s happening here? Well, because it’s cold, dogs are getting less exercise and meaningful stimulation. They might spend more time with their owners because they’re inside, but that’s not all a dog needs. So it’s important to understand some of the things you can do to help your dog. This is an informal list of things that will help to reign in a dog’s mind and body. I often say that you’ll tire a dog out much more quickly by exercising his brain than you ever will with his body. You can gain a lot of leverage by get

In today’s post, I’d like to address a big mistake that some people make when they’re house training. One big error I see people make is giving their dog too many opportunities to go to the bathroom. In the very beginning, when I’m house breaking a puppy, I try to give them lots of opportunities to relieve themselves. So I might take them outside to the bathroom every hour or so. But obviously you also want to teach the dog to “hold it.” This ability is physical, in that there are small muscles that control those bodily functions which need to be developed. But there’s also a mental aspect to it, in that you have to teach your dog to want to hold his bathroom urges. This can happen for a multitude of reasons: the dog wants to be clean, he wants to be rewarded for going outside, or to avoid the correction that cones when he goes inside. Both of these aspects, physical and mental, need to be developed through training and time. Many owners struggle at first to house train their dogs, and eventually get

Today I want to write a little about service dog failures.This is something that not many people like to talk about it, and I honestly don’t either. Failure isn’t fun to think about or dwell on—but they do a lot to teach. They’re important lessons that help us to understand what constitutes a good situation for a service dog. We’ve recently been training a lot of service dogs for a variety of situations. Primarily, we’ve been training dogs to deal with PTSD, autism, diabetes, and seizures. Overall, things have gone well. Our dogs have gone on to live in the home, do a good job, and improve their owner’s quality of life 80-90% of the time. There’s an old saying, however, that 80% of your success comes from 20% of your effort. Though failures constitute only abut 5% of our service dog placements, I would say that in 10-20% of situations there are challenges beyond what we’ve anticipated. The longer I train service dogs, the more I identify the characteristics that go into successful and unsuccessful pairin

Would you believe me if I told you that your dog lies to you? What if I told you that he lies to your trainer? In the beginning stages of our training program, owners frequently say things like: “I have no idea what’s going on; my dog does great here, but when we’re at home he doesn’t behave well at all!” Obviously, as people, we look for the most glaring difference between those two situations. In one case, we’re in a training center; in the other, we’re at home. So a lot of people deduce that the training center itself is the problem. But that can’t be the case. There’s no magical quality at a training center that makes a dog automatically obey. There’s nothing about being at the center that makes a dog say, “Oh man, there are dogs everywhere and a ton of distractions around, but I’m supposed to be obedient here…so I guess that’s what I’ll do!” Owners often say that their dogs behave better when their trainers are around, but that’s not exactly accurate either. So what’s the real issue at hand? It’s

In this post, I’m going to be talking specifically about jumping and biting. I’ve spoken about this a few days ago in another post, but I want to address it head-on here. I just got off the phone with a gentleman who told me: “I’ve got this young dog, and every time the previous owner would give him a toy every time he tried to bite.” This dog is five months old, and now all he does is bite his owner—because he wants to play! This is a method that is being taught by positive trainers, who usually advocate ignoring bad behavior by trying to get the dog to do something else. Not surprisingly, this method often fails. I often see this among people who say things like: “We’ve been working with a trainer for about six months, but our dog is still jumping, so we’re kind of looking around for different training options.” My response is always to tell people that getting a dog to stop jumping should take six minutes, not six months! Later, I find out that their trainer told them to turn their back every time the

With this post, I want to talk about myths surrounding the topic of dominance. Over the years, I’ve heard a lot of truisms like “You can’t let your dog on the couch,” “You have to eat before your dog,” “You need to make sure your dog moves out of your way when you’re walking, rather than stepping around them,” or “You can’t play tug-of-war with your dog—and you definitely can’t lose.” You’ve probably heard some of these things too. Many of those tips are actually just myths. If you’re doing the right things with your dogs—establishing a good relationship, teaching obedience, instilling impulse control—then there is a decent chance that inviting your dog onto the couch or losing at tug-of-war is perfectly fine. It’s not wrong to eat before your dog, but there are so many things that are far more right. We give a social hierarchy checklist that we give for our clients, which outlines things like keeping your dog off the bed and making sure that you walk through doorways first. Those recommendations are

In this post, I’d like to tell you about the lie of positive reinforcement. That felt kind of silly and overdramatic to write, but it’s an important topic. Dog training, like any industry, gets very political. People have specific views and wish to teach those views or force them on others. one of these views is the idea of positive reinforcement. Back in 1994, I started working for a dog trainer. I was just a teenager myself. Up until that point, the overwhelming majority of dog training had been aversive-based, which means that it used a lot of corrections, a certain level of sternness, and certain techniques that not even the toughest dog trainers today would use. But in 1995, we were a few years into a new movement. It went by a lot of different named: Positive Reinforcement Training, R+, Anti-Aversive Training, and others. At the crux of all these philosophies is the idea that we don’t correct the dog. No spray bottles, no training collars. Some even advocate never telling a dog “no.” Unfortunately,

I want to talk about Pavlov. Many people remember hearing about Pavlov in school, and some of you even studied him in depth. If you don't know who he is, go do a quick Google search and find out some more about him, because he was a transformative figure in the study of behavioral theory. Pavlov was a Russian scientist who studied conditioning. He would ring a bell and give a treat, over and over again through a long period of time. This is his most famous experiment, and a good number of people know him for it. What happened? Over time, the sound of the bell became loaded: the sound itself had a lot of meaning to the dogs. If they heard it, they would start to salivate. The sound alone initiated a physical response. So the joke I always make is this: what if Pavlov had been a jerk? He’s done all this work to make the dogs salivate when they hear the bell. What if he had tried to mess around with them? Imagine that he had rung the bell and then smacked the dog in the face. How many times would he need t

In this post, I want to address dog chewing. This issue is a big deal! I just got out of a session with a nine-month old dog who’s doing an absolutely stellar job in training. He’s trained off-leash, he listens at a high level, and he’s doing public access work to become a service dog. But he’s chewing on things, like pool noodles and bags of groceries. Even though he’s doing very well, this one little thing is really nagging at his owners and I. So today I’d like to share a simple chewing formula that works well for many dogs, and is working quite well for this particular client. There are a few practices which, if done right, will almost certainly get a dog through a chewing problem. One of these is supervision. This is the one that most people aren't willing to do. Verbally, they say they’ll do it—but when it comes down to the nitty-gritty of actually watching their dog, most people aren't actually willing. It takes a lot of effort. Now, the best way to supervise is to teach good obedience. When your

Today I want to have a conversation about selecting shelter dogs, a topic about which many people have questions. Recently I spoke with someone who wanted to rescue a dog from the shelter and train it to be a therapy dog. They asked for our help, and I told them I could give them some ideas about what to look for in a dog. I’d like to give that same information to you here. This list isn’t exhaustive, but it’s extensive enough that we can generally use it with success. So I thought I’d share at least a handful of the more important bullet points on that list with you today. Hopefully, if you’re looking to rescue a shelter dog, you’ll find this helpful. The first thing that you should realize is that you’ll probably want to test several dogs. I hate to say this and come across as mean, but there is a reason why some dogs are in shelters. They might have a problematic nervous system, been neglected, or have negative behaviors. Lots of things can totally prevent a dog from being a therapy or service animal.