In my opinion one of our biggest responsibilities as trainers is to do everything we can to make sure we read our dogs motives correctly. Dogs sometimes do the wrong things for the right reasons. And in my mind it is a real detriment to not only the results we get, but to the attitude of our dogs as well. We ask our dogs to do some pretty remarkable things, many which can sometimes be contradictory. Especially at the advanced levels.
If we make a conscious effort to try to always ask ourselves why the dog is doing what it is doing, we will make a lot less mistakes in our training as far as corrections go. It is very important to evaluate if our dogs are giving us an under trained response (the dog knows what to do but is not doing it) or an over trained response (the dog is so worried about what it thinks it is supposed to do that it over responds to what we want it to do). The more advanced our training gets the bigger challenge it is to read our dogs correctly. I have touched on this in previous articles.
So always ask yourself when evaluating your training and your dogs response, is my dog doing the wrong thing for the right reason? This make take some mental work on our part. But don't we owe that to our dogs?
I just did a video for my video blog that gives an example of this very thing. I have included a link to that video above on the left if you are interested in viewing it.
Have a great Christmas,
Dennis
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