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Training the Min Pin

I've been training dogs for quite awhile now. I won't say I've always trained them well—sometimes I've trained them quite poorly. I put a CD on my first Doberman in 1984 using the Koehler method. Read the book, did the training, got the title. I've taught some 4-H classes, then sort of got out of training all together for awhile. Did some breed showing (a super handler I am not!), learned more about the world of dogs, then fell into competition training with a young red male dobe I had called Jasper.

Koehler Training
Now in Koehler training, the basic premise is, you obey me or boy are you going to regret it. Dog forges? Make a quick left turn while lifting your foot/knee, hopefully knocking him in the chest or head. Dog lags? Immediate about right turn with a hard jerk on the leash. The Koehler book describes such lovely things as hanging dogs until unconscious and half drowning them for eating poop. I hear that Bill Koehler was actually a gifted and humane trainer. It's not represented in his book and because of that book a lot of people, including me, have used some extremely abusive methods to get our dogs to heel and do obedience. Do they work? Well heck yes they work—if somebody kicks you in the head whenever you do wrong you're by-golly going to try real hard to be right. Is it how I want to interact with my dogs? No.

Competition Obedience
So enter Jasper. This was the mid 1990s, he was nearing two and I decided I wanted to try for a CD. After a recommendation I found a local competition trainer, who had multiple HIT dogs and at least one OTCh. She championed a new, kinder, gentler training. We used food and toys! And, she assured me, we worked all the way to the UD. No, I didn't just want a CD. I wanted more and I could get more. Well I sure had stars in my eyes, this was perfect!

Except it wasn't. The truth is, that though food treats were used, training very quickly switched to correction as the primary method. Under the mantra of "the dog should never be wrong," we were taught that the dog should never have a thought for itself. Lord forfend it actually offer you any behaviors or think through a problem. Any thinking should be ruthlessly squelched. Prong collars were the rule. I actually have no problem with prong collars for certain dogs. But when the dog wasn't holding attention (which in competition obedience means focusing exclusively on the trainer's face), you were to pop the prong (sharp jerks) until the dog looked at you. And I was trying, I really was. But Jasper wasn't having so much fun. He didn't understand why I kept popping the prong collar. Poor training on my part? Well I was doing what the instructor said, under her eye. One night, he was lagging a bit and not giving me attention. The instructor kept telling me to pop him. Pop him harder. Harder. Until I was actually lifting his front feet off the floor; a nearly 80 pound dog. And he didn't whimper but his eyes got bigger and more dialated, and finally he just glazed, shrank, and wouldn't move. Catatonic with fear. Completely shut down.

I broke into tears and left the floor. I quit. But it was too late. I ruined a dog that night. He was never capable of working again. The moment he had any inkling that he might be doing something wrong, he cowered and shut down.

Jasper broke something in me and I broke something in Jasper. And I didn't train for awhile. But then I got Viva when she was 18 months old and started training in agility and obedience--but the obedience training, doing the only thing I knew (popping and jerking) was stressful even for her, an extremely resilient dog from generations of German working-lines schutzhund dogs. So we struggled through a CD with scores in the low 170s. But in agility we didn't use force. And I discovered that if you give a dog a chance, they come alight with the desire to please you. That they like being given puzzles to solve and finding the right answer. Viva's agility career blossomed and she ended up retiring due to an injury with her MX/MXJ and almost an entire year in the the Doberaman Agility Top 20.

Clicker and Drive
Several years ago I discovered clicker training. Okay, well that's not really honest. What's really honest is that clicker training came on the scene and I thought it was ludicrous. I mean, these people didn't pop their dogs at ALL. They didn't use big corrections. They just ignored behavior they didn't like and expected that to work. And they were preachy about it too. As far as I was concerned, it was a bunch of junk promoted by cultists who thought all dogs were frail little flowers. But slowly, very slowly, I've realized that clicker training actually works, and it works in a way that makes your dog a partner, not a tool. Marry it to drive training, which builds a dog's prey drives and puts the dog in a high state of excitement to work then asks the dog to perform at that high level to get a reward, and you've got an incredibly powerful tool.

Oh and Viva? I retrained her using drive and clicker. In 2005 I stepped into the Rally Obedience ring with her for the first time. It was my first time in the obedience ring since she finished her CD with a 171 in 1999. There were 73 dogs in the class, including several OTCHs. Viva beat them all with a perfect score and a breathtaking attention heel. She retired last fall with her RA title, never scoring below a 97.

If you're interested in really unlocking the power of your dog's mind, if you want a thinking partner that you don't have to hurt to get to work with you, if you want a dog that runs up to you when you're walking out in a field and throws himself into a heel just for the sheer fun of it, try some of the links below.

Obedience

Rally (coming soon)

Agility

Tracking (coming soon)

Earthdog (coming soon)

A special note on housebreaking the Min Pin.

 

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