subroc said:
Training methods - how do you train your dog?
There are many way to train a dog. My question isn?t about who?s method you use but do you follow a specific method or not. Do you use an established program like Smartwork, Mike Lardy, James Spencer, D. L. Walters etc. from page 1 to The End or is your program slightly different. The components that you have added to the established programs what are they? How/why have you modified the programs? If you pieced a program together, why?
Joe Miano
Virtually all of us who have been involved in retriever training for a few years have come to know certain names of trainers. When we see them in print, or hear them spoken, we instantly associate them with achievement and a degree of authority.
In any pursuit there are such people who distinguish themselves through performance. Great athletes, designers, writers, teachers, innovators, etc., all have names that become recognized as being special at those pursuits. There are basically two reasons why this happens, especially in dog training. First, the individual must have superior acumen; keenness and depth of perception, discernment, or discrimination especially in practical matters, and special inborn ability. Second, and this is very important, they do the great things they become known for with exceptional consistency. How does that happen?
Method: 1): a systematic procedure, technique, or mode of inquiry employed by or proper to a particular discipline or art (2): a systematic plan followed in presenting material for instruction (3): a way, technique, or process of or for doing something (4): a body of skills or techniques. Over decades of study and practical research, trends become identified as patterns, and patterns become distilled as principles. Eventually certain principles emerge as constants. They are at least as constant as circumstances will allow empirical evidence to show. Certain variables are ongoing impediments to this study, but we come to understand that through our own experience.
We each seek a fairly specific skill acquisition for our dogs that allows a well-defined performance. The commands they must obey have become pretty uniform, and the performances of retrieving are widely shared among trainers, especially here in America. I have voiced agreement with Mike Lardy many times that the differences in the training of a dog for hunting or for competition are more a matter of degree than of divergent method. It is a superior method that allows more trainers to do their best, dog after dog.
I believe such a method must have two characteristics:
1) It must be based in the soundest of principles.
2) It must be broken down into understandable portions that can be best understood and used by most people, and their dogs.
I think it?s fine to experiment, especially if such experimentation is based in well established principles, and is done by someone with enough experience and genuine empathy to understand when they are (or are not) being fair to the dog being trained. I just hope that new trainers understand early on that they are not alone in this pursuit. You can be a bold individual, as so many desire to be. But your dog may have to cash the checks carelessly written.
Choose a method, and stick with it. I could offer more advice, but probably none better.
Evan
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"There is little reason to expect a dog to be more precise than you are." ~ Rex Carr
