Challenging Behaviors Workshops
The Challenging Behaviors Series contains workshops designed to help dog owners learn the logistics of how force free, ethical dog training works. All workshops are between 1-2 hours long, containing slides and discussion about the topic to help you really understand the topic and encourage you think about how you can apply that information to your individual dog.
Workshops can be purchased independently for $20 per workshop by requesting via email to yooperpaws@gmail.com or viewed in the Challenging Behaviors Collection of the Patreon Memberships for Turning Struggles Into Strengths Tier & the Premium "Trainer Support" Tier.
Helping Distracted Dogs (FREE Workshop!)
This workshop is designed to help dog owners learn the basic info to help them get started with setting up training sessions around distractions. We highly advise that all dog owners work with a Canine Coach, Behavior Consultant or other Canine Professional that is skilled in Behavior Adjustment Training, especially if you are working with a dog with larger than life reactions that may be dangerous to the owner/handler or other people in the area.
This workshop is free to everyone and gives dog owners a chance to see if they will enjoy the workshop series.
Helping Fearful Dogs Feel Safe
As dog owners, we often are surprised or caught off balance if/when our dogs start over reacting to changes in the environment. Perhaps it's a car pulling in the driveway, seeing people or other dogs, or hearing sounds such as gunshots but most dogs are fearful of something.
When that fear is based on something easily controlled, such as Azul's fear of balloon animals, we can manage the situation quite easily by avoiding the triggering object. But when those fears are based on uncontrollable objects such as other people walking their dogs down the trail or thunder booming in the sky, we need to take a different approach to helping our dogs feel safe.
The bottom line is fearful dogs are more prone to barking, lunging, and even biting others. The best way to improve their manners is to help them feel safe. Once they feel safe we can begin training to help them fit better in the family. If you want to learn how to help your fearful dog, this is a great starting place!
Enrichment for Behaviors Workshop
In this workshop, we go over how to help meet your dog's needs through enrichment that allows you to shape the behaviors you love. Enrichment done correctly will help you see a reduction in the behaviors that are driving you crazy and give you an increase in the behaviors you want your dog to do.
Meeting your dog’s needs for physical, emotional, mental, and social needs is a huge part of changing behavior. Unmet needs create undesired behavior. One of the easiest ways to meet your dog’s needs is to add enrichment opportunities to your day to day activities. The challenge is there are many types of enrichment and your dog is a unique individual thus may or may not find a certain type of enrichment enjoyable. Learning more about enrichment will help you to determine what your dog loves and how you can use those loves to get the behaviors you love.
Setting Boundaries Workshop
Many people try to mix a balance of positive reinforcement training with punishment based techniques which very easily leads to confusion on the dog's part. This workshop will help you learn how to use force free methods including using clear communication, managing the environment, removing unwanted reinforcement, and adding well timed reinforcement for the behaviors you love. We will also be going over some reasons why it is important that our dogs learn some boundaries and how we as the owners go about deciding what boundaries to set. Once you decide the boundaries that are important to you in keeping you, your dog, and stuff all safe, you can create a management and training plan to help you through the training process.
Email yooperpaws@gmail.com to get a free worksheet to help you through this process.
Reinforcement for Behaviors
Food is considered a primary reinforcer because all animals need to eat to survive. Delivering food as reinforcement is often the easiest way for an owner to develop strong mechanics and fast delivery speeds to help the dog learn.
What do you do if your dog doesn't like food or has to follow a specific diet?
Will your dog take food inside in low distraction environments but not outside in high distraction environments?
There are many reasons to train with and without food! Without food as a motivator, how can you teach the dog new skills?
While food might be a primary motivator, there are lots of other motivators available to us from the environment and from our relationship with our dogs. In this workshop, we talk about functional reinforcers and how we can use those things our dogs want most to shape the behaviors we want to see most frequently.
Understanding Canine Choice
THE CONCEPT OF TEACHING OUR DOGS TO MAKE CHOICES OR EVEN ENCOURAGING OUR DOGS MAKE CHOICES IS UNCOMMON FOR MANY DOG OWNERS.
Like many of my clients, my experience with dogs was with the philosophy that you had to teach the dog who was in control. With this strong human history of punishing dogs into submission, it's understandable that we are not quite used to letting our dogs make choices, much less encouraging our dogs to make choices. Unfortunately it is the human dominance model that has prevented many dogs from learning how to cope with environmental changes to learning how to make choices that may or may not impact their life. Most of the fearful, aggressive, and overly excitable dogs struggle with confidence which includes the ability to make choices.
If you missed it be sure to check out my recent blog on Choices, Agency, and Boundaries!
Here I shared the definition of Choice as the freedom to do different behaviors in the environment.
One of the common debates about Canine Choice is the arguments that if we give dogs choices, they will do things that are unsafe! My big mission is to help people create a foundation of rules that help them decide what choices the dog can/should make and when might a human have to step in with directions.
Some people believe that once you give a dog options and choices, they will become the boss and rule the house. I don't know about you, but I've never seen a dog actually run for president or been elected the ruler of any country let alone a household. Now you might think Azul rules our house, and often his needs dictate what I do and when but that's my choice to do the best I can to give him what he wants, when he wants it. But the choices I give him are still defined by my boundaries that I've set for my dogs. There is another webinar available in this series that was recorded a few months ago about Setting Boundaries. You can access this workshop on the Changing Struggles to Strengths Membership in Patreon!
In the Confidence Canines Class we discuss the Confidence of One's Self or the Ability to Make Choices Successfully. In this class we look at how to build simple choices with games like the Pick One Game that is easy for our dog to make the "right" choice. The right choice being one that earns them a yummy food treat. One of the other key concepts taught in this class is to avoid offering choices that have an unacceptable solution. Don't ask your dog to choose between kibble and cheeseburger if the choice of taking the cheeseburger is unacceptable and you're not really going to let them have it.
The choices each dog owner is comfortable giving their dog ties really close to the boundaries or rules for their household which makes this topic very much an individualized process. This makes it a complicated topic and why we decided to host this as one of the Challenging Behaviors Series Lunch & Learn Webinars.
It's not the exact choices that we give our dogs that impact their behavior. Agency, or the perception of how much freedom you have to make choices, is the key to choices affecting confidence and thus impact behavior. In this webinar we will be taking a look at the whole dog including!
How the dog's choices change the environment or the distractions in the environment.
How the dog's choices impact their feeling of agency or perception of control over the environment.
How the dog's choices impact their confidence to try new things and their resiliency or ability to recover from triggers or other perceived threats in the environment.
How the dog's choices can impact their health physically as much as emotionally.
How the dog's choices can lead to the dog choosing to do the behaviors we love vs the behaviors that drive us crazy!
Understanding Canine Desire to Learn
All animals will continue to learn their whole life, including dogs!
Have you ever heard the false old wives tale, "You can't teach an old dog new tricks?" This implies that we hit an age where learning is no longer a possibility.
The fact is very young, juvenile through adolescent animals, do seem to learn very quickly! Just take a look at puppy Belle and all she's learned at just 5 months old. Younger dogs learn more rapidly simply because they are more easily motivated and easily redirected to focus on basic needs such as food since they need to eat frequently. As dogs age, they often switch to eating 1-2 main meals a day, sometimes with grazing in the middle.
If food is plentiful, dogs become less and less motivated. A puppy will readily work for kibble because they are always hungry and they haven't learned yet about other amazing food options. The more kibble the dog eats, the less rewarding it becomes and over time, dogs will start to seek out variety.
Coincidentally, humans often start training with a low value reinforcement as kibble. Then when environmental distributions start occurring, humans keep trading up for a higher and higher value treat, unintentionally teaching dogs to wait until something tastier comes along. Eventually distractions become so great that no level of food is reinforcing anymore. Often that's when humans stop trying to train new tricks!
No matter what age a dog is, they are constantly learning how to get what they want and need. A dog will learn how to ask for food when they are hungry or learn where they might find food to steal. They learn how to get to the good smells, perhaps pulling on the leash to reach it or communicating with the human in a learned way to say "Hey, it's over here!"
I know if Azul's nose goes straight up in the air, his body is soon going to point in the direction of the smell. If he pulls towards that smell we are going the opposite direction which is not what he wants. But if he doesn't pull and proceeds at a pace that fits my needs, I'll follow him to check out nearly every smell he wants. Letting Azul choose the direction, reinforces the speed I choose... teamwork!
Why does Azul sometimes still pull?
Because he's also learned that sometimes I'm going to tell him no, we can't go in a certain direction. Depending on how awesome that smell is, he may accept my "no" answer or he may try to communicate even more just how much he really wants to go that way. This is just one of the challenges we face when accidental learning happens. Accidental learning is when we (the human) are not in "training mode" so we don't pay attention to the life lessons taking place all around us. Our dogs learn all kinds of things this way when we are not trying to teach them!
Listen to this Lunch & Learn Workshop to get more great tips about how animals learn and how we can help them learn the lessons we want while preventing the activities that teach the wrong lessons!
If you're seeing this and are not part of the Challenging Behaviors Series or Turning Struggles Into Strengths Membership, please check our Patreon Membership for more info or email me at yooperpaws@gmail.com
Creating a Leash You Love
This is a 2 Hour Workshop with Crazy2Calm Coaches joining me to discuss Leash Manners.
We talk about how what you want your dog to do while on leash may look different for different people, in different environments, and with different dogs. We share how we train the the leash manners we love and give you suggestions for how you can decide what is best for you.
Then I share some of my favorite games to start with indoor training to teach skills that will help our dogs outside on a leash. These games can then be played in the backyard, the driveway, and slowly building up to neighborhood parks.
Then we discuss gear and give you tips for finding the best gear for your dog. We talk about considering your dog's needs including physical, social, and emotional needs that may be tied to leash manners. Since environments can be so tricky, we tell you how to build up to new environments successfully.
Last but definitely not least, we end the workshop with our favorite games to play in any environment including the 24 Hour Bowling Video with the directions for how to play around distractions that might be challenging for your dog.
So yes, it's a 2 hr video! Feel free to take breaks and listen in sections or let it play while you are doing something such as cleaning your house. The only parts you'll want to watch is the games sections!
Please let me know if you have any questions!
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