Today’s guest is Nate Schoemer. Nate is a former US Marine. He is a graduate of the Tom Rose School of Dog Training, and he’s a well-known dog trainer that a lot of you probably recognized from YouTube or Animal Planet where he hosted Rescue Dog, just superD dog, Nate’s YouTube channel’s. Pretty awesome. I recommend everybody check it out.

There’s a ton of stuff on there. There’s some great podcasts, but he has everything from puppy stuff to obedience tricks, even things like tracking. So I definitely recommend everybody check that out. Nate, welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on. Hey, I appreciate you having me. Absolutely. Well, let’s dive right in.

We’re all dog trainers. We all, uh, have a passion for dogs. But Nate, what gets you excited? What gets you fired up every day? 

I think I get most excited about teaching others how to handle and work with their dogs in a way that they can start applying. Because one of the things that’s really difficult about what people are experiencing now, having dogs is not the lack of information, but too much information.

And we know that there’s a lot of conflicting information online and people don’t know which path should I take, what is the best option for my dogs? So I’ve taken everything I’ve learned since I started training back in 2012 under my first mentor, Tom Rose, who’s legendary in my mind, in the dog world.

The guy’s done some very incredible things, and one of the things that I noticed that stood out quite a bit about Tom Rose and what I believe made him such an exceptional dog trainer, besides of course having a passion for the sport and dogs is his. Insane level of patience. So that’s something right away.

We have to be very patient when it comes to working and training with dogs, but I took all the information and I tried to think about it in a way that’s easy for me to understand. And if it’s easy for me to understand, then it’s usually going to be easy for others. So I’ve come up with a step-by-step process.

Now, a lot of this I’ve also gotten from Michael Ellis. I like to give credit where credit is due, and he’s my all time favorite dog trainer, so I often reference him quite a bit because I study his work pretty obsessively. If you’re not familiar, he has a really great membership on his website where you can sign up and you can get his full curriculum from the Michael Ellis School.

So instead of having to pay however much it used to cost to go there in person, we get the same information now. So really super valuable. One of the big things that I like to always talk about, and this is even with basic pet clients, whether I’m working with a pet client that has obedience goals, behavioral issues, or if I’m working with somebody that wants to train their service dog or somebody who wants to be a professional dog trainer, I always go through the same process.

Now, you’ve probably heard people say things like dog training’s, not cookie cutter. Well, it kind of can be in some areas. We can follow the same step-by-step process and we might have to adjust each step according to the dog that we’re working with. So if I have a dog, for example, that has really low perseverance, I may have to increase the rate of reinforcement to get the dog to continue to work, and I have to adjust in that way through successive approximation or assisted shaping.

While I’m rewarding steps towards that final pitcher. But we’re still doing the same. Steps. And then as I said, learning theory is something that’s incredibly important. I want people to understand why they’re doing what they’re doing and how this plays into their training. And then practicing each skillset until it gets to a point where they’re utilizing all of the skills to get the dog into, get the results that they want.

So the very first thing, it’s always engagement training, but with learning theory, it’s understanding the difference between classical and opera conditioning. And I’ve had people and other trainers tell me, I don’t waste time trying to teach that information to my clients. They’re not going to understand it anyways.

And I disagree with that. I think often we put this profession of being a dog trainer on a pedestal, but most people can figure this out. If we explain it well, why do people always get so confused when we start talking about negative reinforcement? Because there’s been so many things, even that movie in Hollywood Blockbuster from the 1980s, I think it was 1989, if you guys remember, they’re in the basement.

The library, I believe it was. And they’re shocking, the guy. And he says, yeah, we’re doing a study on the effects of negative reinforcement and response in stressful situation. It’s like, no, that’s positive punishment. What you’re doing, you’re shocking them for the wrong answer. And so once people start to understand what they’re doing, it empowers them to be able to make the decisions without constantly needing a dog trainer.

I believe that the success of a dog trainer is often based on how long the client needs them. Now of course, if they’re training to be a professional dog trainer or service dog or something more advanced, of course that’s going to take longer. But for most basic obedience and even behavioral modification, it really shouldn’t take too long.

And if we look at obedience and behavioral modification, I like to define it as obedience is a dog not doing something we want them to do. And then. A behavioral issue is a dog doing things we don’t want them to do, but in the end, it’s still behaviors that we’re trying to shape and get the dog to perform the way that we want, regardless of the environment.

I mean, it sounds easy enough, but of course, how do we do that? This is how I like to define classical conditioning, and I know dog trainers, we always talk about this, but again, explaining it in a way for most people to understand, I think helps quite a bit. So this is what I say. Classical conditioning is a dog’s recognition of a pattern outside of their control that’s relevant to them.

So if they. Discover any sort of pattern that’s not in their control, but it’s relevant to them, we end up seeing a change of behavior because dogs are really good at pattern recognition. So the analogies or the examples that I use is, yeah, examples. If I grab a leash from the wall and I put it on the dog, every time I do that, my dog enjoys going on a walk.

What ends up happening when I grab the leash, the dog becomes excited. If I always take the dog to a field down the street where I play fetch, once the dogs know we’re going to play fetch, they get excited. If I only take my dog to the car when I’m taking him to the vet and my dog doesn’t like going to the vet, the moment they recognize that pattern, they start to become anxious and they start to blow their coat and pant heavy.

These signals that we see when a dog is under some sort of stress. So once we notice. We understand how classical conditioning works. We can be aware of this when we start to see behaviors that our dog is performing, because often the response, a classically conditioned response, as you guys know, is involuntary.

The dog’s not choosing to salivate. They’re not choosing to get excited. This is an involuntary response to the pattern that they’ve learned to recognize. And then of course, if we want to change that, then we do counter conditioning, which is just classical conditioning. It’s a pattern. We’re just changing the sequence.

One of my buddies, who’s a really great trainer, Carlos Ramirez, he says, we prove the dog wrong. If the dog has something in mind that they think is going to happen, we prove them wrong by making it predict something different. Now, something that’s very important to understand about this, if I have a dog that, let’s say, the signal within the sequence is a fear inducing signal.

So we’re getting a fearful response and we want to counter condition the dog away from that. So let’s use the car example going to the vet. And I use that because as a child, the family dog, we never took that dog anywhere. I didn’t know better as a kid, we only took the dog to the car if the dog was going to the vet, or if the dog was gonna be boarded somewhere because we were going on vacation.

So the moment that dog knew we were going to the car, all the signs of anxious behavior started to come to the surface quite rapidly. So, okay, we wanna change the dog’s emotional response to the car. So what do we do? We change the pattern, we take the dog to the car, and then we don’t go anywhere. We leave or we go on a walk.

Eventually the signal of the car now predicts something new. Classical counter conditioning. But something that a lot of people fail to realize is there’s also something known as spontaneous recovery. It’s not like we’re completely removing that prior conditioning. It’s underneath the surface. The way that I like to explain it, it’s like putting white out over whatever the prior conditioning was that the dog had and writing the new condition response above it, but it’s not completely gone.

If I get lazy with the new process, then the old conditioning can come back to the surface and it can happen quite rapidly. That’s why it’s called spontaneous recovery, and it usually throws people off. So it helps to stay on a routine where you’re maintaining that new counter condition sequence. And then if we think about.

Operate conditioning since this also plays hand in hand with a lot of the stuff that we do. I define it as a dog’s recognition of a pattern within their control, or at least they believe that they’re in control. And then I break down the four quadrants. Now, of course, everybody knows that every dog trainer at this point knows positive is adding right?

Negative is taking away. Reinforcement is encouraging the repeat of the behavior, whereas punishment is preventing the repeat of the behavior. The positive and the negative always happens. After the behavior. I started to point this out more often because of comments that I would see on my YouTube channel.

People would ask things with negative reinforcement. If we’re talking about leash pressure, they would say, you added the pressure, so wouldn’t that be positive then, because you’re talking about adding, it’s like, well, no, because we’re getting behaviors through opera conditioning, and when the dog completes the behavior, we remove the pressure.

So the removal is the negative. We don’t give a dog a treat before they do the behavior. We give them the treat after they do the behavior. We don’t punish a dog before they do the behavior. We punish them. After. And of course the, the, and of course the closer the connection between the behavior and the consequence, the stronger the connection.

And then that’s when we start using classical conditioning with opera conditioning. And then I also teach about intrinsic and extrinsic motivators. Now, this is going to be the internal or steal reinforcing versus the external. I’m doing it to gain access something or to prevent something from happening.

And often when I’m talking about this with a new client, they wanna jump to whatever their issue is. Okay, I’m, how is this gonna help me with leash reactivity? We haven’t even talked about leash reactivity yet, and I have to remind them. Understanding learning theory is going to help you not only implement techniques that’s going to get you on the path to getting the solution that you need, but it’s also gonna teach you how to adjust when something may not be working.

And that’s why as dog trainers, we learn a wide variety of techniques because if one’s not working, it doesn’t mean that the technique is flawed, it just means it’s not working on this dog. A classic example is the yelping. If a puppy bites my hand and I make a Yelp sound, sure that may work on some dogs.

But other puppies are going to continue to bite. They might even find it fun. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t work, it just means it doesn’t work for that dog and it’s how the dog perceives it. Same thing if I take a water hose and I spray a dog with a water hose. There’s a percentage of dogs that they will see that as positive punishment, and there’s another group that’s gonna jump and bite at it and wanna play with it.

That group sees it as positive reinforcement. So the way the dogs perceive these things is going to affect how we adjust as well. So again, this is always really, really important. 

So then, now that. Yeah, go ahead. Can we pause there for one second? I think, of course, this will be a, just a question I, I would assume a lot of our listeners are thinking about.

So that was a great explanation of operating conditioning and classical, and I would hope all of our, the, at least the dog trainers listening, you know, already know all of that stuff. But you mentioned you walk through this with all of your clients. What does that look like? Because that’s a lot of information that’s like drinking from a fire hose, right?

To try to Oh, yeah. Kind of take all that in. What does that look like? How much time are you spending with clients to walk through that? Are you giving ’em handouts? Are you referring to videos? What, what’s the process there? 

Yes, I do refer to videos as well as handouts that I give them in email, things for them to read and study.

And I often think about. Bloom’s cognitive taxonomy when it comes to teaching. If we give someone a lot of information, and this is just based on the left and right hemisphere of the brain, he has a little pyramid if you look it up, and there’s different versions of it at this point, but I always went off of the one that I originally learned, which the bottom is knowledge.

Then you have application comprehension, analysis and synthesis. So everyone starts off at that bottom level where you’re just getting information and you don’t fully understand it yet. I mean, thinking back when I was a Marine, when I was going through drill instructor school, we had to basically memorize the SOP, and I read it in drill instructor school didn’t understand really any of it, at least.

In a form of applying it and working with the recruit or recruits. But then when I started studying again later, after having a few cycles, everything made complete sense because I’ve been doing it for a while. So after we get a lot of that data, we don’t understand it completely yet. It helps satisfy that left hemisphere of the brain.

And then when we start applying it, we still don’t fully understand it. We’re kind of going through the motions. We hope we’re doing it right, but then eventually we hit that aha moment, and that’s my goal with each client that I’m working for. I want them to get to the aha moment. If I’m training a dog trainer, I want them to be at least at the analysis level where they can look at other people, they can read what the human’s doing, what the dog is doing, and they can quickly realize what’s going right and what’s going wrong, so they can properly inform the client.

But if we can get everyone to the aha moment, then it really greatly empowers them. So once I kind of cover the learning theory side of it, then I go into the actual step-by-step process and the first thing that I do with every single dog that I train, again, it doesn’t matter which discipline. Within dog training, I always start with building a relationship.

And this is why when I do seminars. I don’t have fearful dogs or aggressive dogs come to the seminar. I will have friendly dogs. And someone’s like, oh, well you can’t work with an aggressive dog. It’s like, no, I’m not gonna take an aggressive dog. Fight that dog in front of a bunch of people. Get the dog to do an extinction burst where suddenly now it seems like it’s fixed, but I actually didn’t do anything.

We have to build a relationship first. That’s foundation. It’s one of the reasons why an aggressive dog doesn’t bite its owner. It’ll bite someone else, but it doesn’t bite the owner because they have a relationship. So before I use any sort of aversives on a dog and aversive defined as something the dog greatly dislikes.

So any sort of pressure, negative punishment, again, it depends on how the dog perceives it. One dog, I take a toy away they go, I don’t care. Another dog, I take a toy away. And they’re gonna be very frustrated about that. You think Malise and Dutch Shepherds, German Shepherds, these types of working breeds.

So with the engagement training. What I used to do was I would get my clients to start by implementing marker training, loading the marker, charging the marker. We would get the dog to look at them with some kind of signal, whether making noise, showing the dog that they have food, tapping the dog, doesn’t matter.

Once a dog would look, I would tell them, you have to mark. Then you have to pause for a half second to prevent overshadowing and then enter the reward event. And for those that aren’t familiar, overshadowing is when two things are presented to a dog at the exact same time. Whatever is most relevant to them is what they’re going to focus on, and they’ll completely ignore the other element within the sequence.

So we have to say the word pause. And then enter the reward event so it can become predictable for the dog. I often tell people, think about it as questions and answers. If we communicate something verbally to a dog and we want the dog to understand what that means, what we’re really doing is we’re asking the dog a question.

I’m saying, Hey, do you know what to do or how to respond? When I say yes, or when I say sit or when I say down dog’s like, no, I don’t. I don’t know what any of that means. And then I show them through those patterns. So now I have someone brand new and they’re thinking, okay, I gotta get the dog’s attention.

The dog’s gonna look at me. Now I have to say the word, I have to make sure I say it consistently because I don’t want to create. 10 different markers, even though I’m using the same word because the way that I say it changes what the dog hears. Then I have to pause. Now I have to enter a reward event, and what I noticed was it was way too much for most people.

Even just handling the food the right way was too difficult for a lot of people in my course that I have on sit, stay, learn. I have a whole section on food handling drills and even in the beginning I’m like, these are going to seem silly, but trust me, they matter. I had a client once that was going through one of my intensive programs and.

He would keep all his treats in a satchel. So every time he rewarded the dog, he’s like flipping open the satchel trying to get in to get the treat. And what we are seeing was that post reinforcement pause, the dog would get the treat, look, oh yeah, you’re effing around with your satchel. I’m gonna go do other things.

So then very quickly the dog would get a reward and check out. He wasn’t able to continue the rate of reinforcement that was needed for his puppy, and it was a working, uh, lab. So it came from hunting lines. So high energy, let’s go, go, go. And he wasn’t able to keep up. So these food handling drills help with that as well.

So then what I start to do, I said, okay, well it’s too difficult to get them to mark to separate then to enter the reward event. ’cause what ends up happening, they take too long to mark the dog checks out because they’re trying to figure out the whole sequence in their head. Or they would mark and they would do it with the movement.

So now they’re pairing so they’re not connected in anyways and they’re building bad habits and they weren’t even that good at delivering the reward yet. So I said, okay, what we’re gonna do now after doing the food handling skills, now I just want you to get creative with the reward event. It’s not just the reward that we give the dog, it’s the way in which we give the reward.

And then another mistake I think a lot of trainers make is, and I’ve seen this on even some of my friends, they’ll ask me to check out something they’re posting to promote an event or group classes or something like that. And something I often see in there is it’ll say, bring really high value rewards.

Well, high value rewards can be good, but we also have to be aware of the possibility of developing the um. Negative, uh, what do they call it? Um, it’ll come to me. But when the dog is expecting a higher value reward because we’ve paid him at a higher level, and then we go back, negative behavioral contrast, that’s what I was thinking of or what is often referred to as violation of expectation.

If I take a dog and let’s think zero to a hundred dollars and I am taking that dog somewhere, I’m like, well, they said valuable, so I’m gonna bring a bunch of a hundred dollars bills and now I’m paying that dog, all these a hundred dollars bills. And then we get back to the house and I say, okay, let’s drop back to your normal $20 payment.

And I start paying with $20. That shift is too much to where now we’ve lost a significant amount of motivation. Now, again, it depends on the dog. You have some dogs where you can fluctuate between 60 and 40, and you’re gonna see. The negative behavioral contrast, but then you have other dogs that you can fluctuate between 110 and they won’t care.

My Labrador retriever, it doesn’t matter what you give him, if it’s edible, he’s pumped up. He’s excited about it. Well, all food is a hundred for a lab. Yeah. Doesn’t matter. Exactly. Right. And 

and edible is debatable. 

Right. Right. That’s very true too. Yeah. So keeping these things in mind, we don’t wanna raise it so high that we can’t bring them back down, but then we can also be strategic with it.

And I’m open about how I do my videos, how I film, how I train, and one of the things I do when I work with my dog, so I have a pretty consistent schedule. They usually get some sort of morning exploration where we go out, we walk, I let them sniff the ground pee, do all those sorts of dogs. Dog things. And then we’ll do, um, in the morning I give them raw dog food and then they will get a training session in the evening.

It switched More recently, I put a video up about a year and a half ago of their routine. It’s switched since then. I try to get in bite work. I try to get in some sort of tug. That’s the bite work. And I try to do some kind of fetch. Usually I’ll take ball on a rope. I, I think that’s great because I could play tug with my dog and then I can also have them fetch it.

I don’t need the chuck it. ’cause you can launch a ball on a rope super far by doing the little spin and throw. Mm-hmm. I mean, you can get that a pretty good distance. And then when I do my obedient sessions, I use kibble. I just use normal kibble with my dogs. Then if I take my dogs out in public, or if I’m doing some sort of filming and I wanna have a reward with me, I take freeze dried dog food.

It’s a little bit more valuable. So it increases their drive and motivation in the training, they look better, they look more enthusiastic about it because now they’re getting what’s known as the positive behavioral contrast. They get kibble all the time. Now suddenly I’m giving them the freeze dried food and they look more excited.

They know the behaviors in both cases, but they perform it better when they’re more pumped up about the reward. So we can be strategic with this. So then I teach them how to reward in a way that’s interesting. I could take four pieces of food and hand that to a dog and they can eat those four off my hand and I can take that same four and I can move back to have the dog come get it.

I could throw a piece like I’m rolling dice at the casino in one direction. The dog gets that, comes back, I roll another piece in that direction, the dog goes and gets that piece, comes back and I give it the fourth piece. And that right there was one reward event. And for most dogs, that’s gonna be way more valuable than just handing them the four.

So I also teach them when you’re practicing your reward events, I have them just practice the reward event. You wanna make it different. You don’t want it to always be the same. ’cause that’s another one of the factors that cause that post reinforcement pause if the dog learns a sequence, same with like a reinforcement schedule.

If I do a fixed ratio reinforcement schedule, where let’s say they’re getting a reward and they’re not getting a reward, they’re getting a reward, and then they’re not getting a reward, well, they figure out that pattern too. They get more excited when they know it’s the rep that’s going to be the reward and less excited for the rep where they know they’re not.

And that’s why of course, most behaviors and most trainers, we switch to that variable reinforcement schedule so the dog doesn’t know when they’re going to get it. But changing it up helps. Now, once they get really good at that, now I say, okay, ’cause that’s easy. All they have to do is think. Dog looks at me.

Alright, reward dog. Looks at me. Okay, reward. They don’t have to think about any of the words once they feel like that’s down. And of course, practicing the stuff away from the dog as well. Now also, keep in mind, this is stuff I have them do if they’re training their dog from start to finish. If I’m doing a stay and train.

Then I’m teaching them how to use the tools that I’ve built so they don’t have to do the engagement training unless they want to reprogram the dog in a sense to their voice and their delivery. So I often do recommend it, but I don’t make anything mandatory for anyone that I work with. I say, these are things I would recommend doing.

If you wanna be a good handler, a good trainer, and I’m sure you guys are familiar with this, you take a really poorly trained dog and you put that dog in the hands of someone like Ivan Bella Banov, and that dog’s gonna look amazing. You take a well-trained dog and put it in the hands of someone who’s not trained, and the dog’s gonna look terrible.

It’s one of the reasons why, and I’m sure a lot of dog trainers that have YouTube channels with a big following, and they have lots of instructional training videos, even if they take a brand new dog that they’ve never trained, never worked with, I can guarantee at least one person in the comments said.

It would be nice if you used an untrained dog. It’s like this dog is untrained. They’re just making the dog look good because they’ve handled so many dogs. They’ve worked with so many dogs. It’s the same reason why a black belt and juujitsu can make a sweep look effortless. And then you try and you’re like, you, you make it look so easy.

Why can’t I do it? It’s a small little details that make all the difference. So of course I have them also practice the markers without the dog. I say, imagine you have a dog in front of you and practice this. Now let’s say we get that down. What’s step two in my system? Teaching allure. I teach allure to every dog.

Now, I’ve been thinking more about this since I’ve done the interview with Ivan Bella Banov, if you go and watch that, he talks a lot about using toys to even teach behaviors. And the struggle is an opportunity for the dog to learn. But as of right now, I still do use a lot of food because I think it’s really easy to get into using food.

And I think most people can use food relatively quickly to get desired behaviors. So the first three things that I have to teach before I move on to the next step is getting the dog to sit with all lure, getting the dog to lay down with allure and getting the dog to walk forward. Now, of course, a common thing that a lot of people say is, my dog’s not food motivated.

Well, if your dog’s alive, your dog has some food motivation, now we can manipulate that. Right? And just like we were talking a little bit earlier, I should say, I was talking a little bit earlier about the negative behavioral contrast. One of the things that. Prevents or not prevents, but I think a lot of dog trainers steer away from because of the negative behavioral contrast.

And that’s doing things like day training. I know lots of trainers that are like, if I’m gonna work with the dog, I’m taking the dog from the owner and they can get the dog back at the end. Well why? Why is that an issue? Well, because lots of owners spoil their dog. If I’m working with somebody and they free feed their dog and their dog has full access to all the toys, and there’s two other dogs in the house and they have a doggy door to the backyard and they’re running around playing.

Taking food whenever they feel like it, and just having a good old time getting lots of treats. Then when I take that dog, the odds of that dog wanting to work for me. Yeah, of course that dog’s gonna seem like it doesn’t have any food drive. You took all that food drive away previously in the day or the week or however long you’ve been doing that.

So simply by using the little bit of restriction to when they eat, putting slight barriers in front of. Those moments that they eat. Like it doesn’t have to be extreme. I used to say just don’t feed ’em unless they’re willing to work for it. And that does work. But some dogs will wait a good amount of time.

And what I’ve learned is that we can also just create new obstacles for the dog to navigate through to get to the food that they currently eat. So, uh, an example could be, and I picked this up from Yorkshire Canine Academy. I believe the trainer’s name is Jacob. Uh, so like putting the food in a box and the dog has to reach their head into the box to get the food.

We’re just gradually making it more challenging. And then we can start making the dog work for their food. And I don’t even like say working for their food. I like saying play for the food. ’cause really it should be fun. It should be a good time. Even when we add corrections, when we’re looking at this whole force free and the arguments that people have between balanced traditional, it’s like.

None of us got into dog training because we want to correct or punish a dog. That would be insane. And if you’re in dog training for that reason, you should probably find a new profession. ’cause this one’s not for you. But we do it to get reliability. And what I like to say, it’s an insurance policy for the dog.

If I train my dog and my dog’s really well-behaved and very desired by other people, if something were to happen to me, the odds of that dog ending up in the shelter is significantly lower because we have the obedience. And that’s what I mean by an insurance policy. Sorry, I I go in different directions sometimes.

I’ve 

A question ahead, you, you just on, on that topic of just talking about food for a second and just backing up to where you mentioned some dogs aren’t food motivated, or at least you hear that. And of course we, we all see that, right? Where people mm-hmm. Will say, a dog’s not food motivating, they don’t wanna work.

I think one of the big differences is of, I agree with what you said, but also a good trainer really engages with the dog, even if they’re not acting super excited, their excitement mm-hmm. The dog picks up on, there’s, you know, it’s like a dance. Right. There’s a real connection there that I think a lot of new, uh, dog owners struggle with.

I guess, first off, do you agree with that, and if so, can you speak to that a little bit? 

Yes, I do agree with that, and I’ve had plenty of experiences that support that. And of course we’re talking in a very generalized sense. This isn’t everybody, but I was doing a promotion for BarkBox. This is just an example, and they gave me a bunch of boxes.

I think I had maybe 10 extra boxes. So I went to a local dog park. I was outside of the dog park. I had my filming crew. And as people were leaving, I said, Hey, do you want a free BarkBox? All I ask is let my cameraman get some footage of you playing with your dog. And we’re not even gonna film your face.

We’re just gonna film the dog playing with the toys. And pretty much everyone we asked was incapable of getting their dog to play with the toy in that environment. And I had to step in and get the dog to play. A lot of times they don’t understand simple movement, and it’s because a lot of it seems. It’s like counterintuitive.

It seems intuitive to us because we’ve been doing it for so long, but someone brand new, they’re thinking, oh, here’s the toy, here it is. And of course they’re trying to shove it into the dog’s face, and that creates the exact opposite effect. The dog is like, dude, get that outta my face. But the moment we move it away, suddenly it kicks in that pray, drive, play, drive, whatever you wanna call it, and the dog is going after it, and then we’re using that.

But then of course, there’s lots of other things that add to it. The way people praise is a big one. If someone doesn’t have that. High pitch, excited. Body language matters too, of course, if we’re not comfortable around the dogs. So there’s lots of elements that can create a response that often dog trainers get because they are around countless dogs.

They work with dogs all the time, and so the energy that they bring from having that confidence, it was one of the things that used to drive me nuts when people would say things like, oh, you gotta be the confident leader. It’s like, well, confidence comes as a byproduct of knowing what to do. Once you learn and you know what to do, then confidence goes hand in hand with that.

We can fake confidence to people sometimes, but you can’t fake confidence to a dog. They can smell right through it, and there’s plenty of studies that support that. If I’m around a dog that’s. Aggressive, and I’m nervous and I’m worried about it. The dog’s going to be able to sense that, and of course that’s going to affect their behavior.

So not everyone can naturally praise their dog in a way that gets ’em excited. Not everyone naturally moves in a way that gets and encourages movement and energy from their dog. Not everyone knows how to naturally play, and that’s a big part of what we have to teach them. Does that answer that question?

It does, yeah. And I think we could talk about that for hours, but I think it’s at least enough to get. People chewing on that a little bit. 

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And we’re gonna go back to a lot of these things too. So with the luring, we’ll go back to the luring. We can get every dog to follow all lure if we have the time for it.

And the reason why I teach the dog sit down and to walk forward minimum before I move on to the next step is because that’s what helps me teach the next step, which is leash pressure or yielding to the leash. Now. Um, for those who’ve been in dog training for a while, I don’t know how long you guys have been in dog training, but you’ve probably seen the way that leash pressure was taught a decade ago was you would just turn on the pressure and you would wait for the dog to figure it out.

I apply pressure, the classical opposition reflex kicks in. I wait, I wait. Eventually the dog moves with the pressure we release and we praise and reward. The problem with that was that it was. Stressful, mildly stressful. And we would often warn clients like, all right, this might be a little stressful, but we have to get through it.

’cause the two most important things when doing negative reinforcement in order for it to be effective is once the pressure’s turned on, it can’t be turned off until the subject complies and the moment the subject complies, we have to turn it off instantly. Well, with negative reinforcement, there are all kinds of wrong answers, and there’s one right answer.

So if we put our dogs in a situation where they have to provide an answer to turn off some kind of pressure, this could be stressful, especially if they don’t give us the right answer. The analogy that I use with my clients, I say, imagine you’ve never been in a car before. And you get in my car, my car starts to beep, and you go, what’s that beeping noise?

And I say, figure it out. That might be a little annoying and obnoxious. You might start pressing buttons, you’re gonna roll down the window. Like, how the heck do I turn this anoint, obnoxious, beeping off? And I say, just buckle your seatbelt. Oh, okay. Now all the stress goes away. I gave them the solution to the problem.

And that’s the exact same thing we do with dogs now. So if I want my dog or the dog that I’m training to understand that lifting up the leash is a cue to sit, I could force him. Sure, I could lift up, push on the butt until he stops resisting and release the pressure. But that’s not as ideal. So what I do is I’ll slowly start to move the leash in front of the dog.

The dog sees it. They’re looking at it and they’re like, huh, what is this guy doing with this leash? And I always think about those patterns. Then the leash gets tight, very light tension. I do maybe half pound of pressure at most. I keep my other hand behind my back where I have the food reward. After the dog feels the pressure, there’s the problem.

The car’s beeping. Now I bring out the food lure, I lure the dog into the sit. I told ’em to buckle their seatbelt. The dog sits. I turn off the pressure, I give ’em the reward. I do the same thing with the down. I do the same thing with walking forward, and I like to get those three as quickly as possible because this unlocks what I call teachable moments.

So now if we think about behavioral issues, we have five main subcategories. Now, this is broken down in a way that’s easier to understand. There’s more technical terms for this, but this is the way that I explain it. We have dangerous behaviors, destructive behaviors, behaviors based on fear, aggression, or behaviors.

We don’t want a dog to perform. Now, of course, that’s a very simplified way of looking at, there’s all kinds of different ways that a dog might be afraid. There’s all kinds of different ways that a dog might be aggressive, but it’s a simple place to start now with just dangerous and destructive behaviors.

If that’s not based on fear or aggression, then usually I’ll just go right to. A correction event where the dog is going to receive some kind of positive punishment to do the behavior, but it has to be truly dangerous and truly destructive. And what I mean by that is something that a puppy could be doing.

Let’s say for example, when that puppy is an adult, that could be a dangerous or destructive behavior, but as a puppy, it’s not dangerous or destructive yet. So because of that, I wouldn’t treat a puppy the same way as I would treat an older dog in a very similar context, and I’ll give you a real actual example.

My German Shepherd, when he was a puppy, he tried chewing on my computer wires. That could be a dangerous and destructive behavior. But the moment he went to do it, I prevented it. And I prevented it every time. And so he stopped trying. He goes, well, that’s no fun. I tried it and I didn’t have to go to any sort of correction to stop it.

I just had to prevent it and then redirect the dog to something else. So what, and they, what 

does prevent mean in that scenario? 

Yeah, so prevent is, that’s part of the teachable moment. So the way that I define a teachable moment is when we are showing a dog a preferred behavior. So I have three key events that I teach all my clients.

The reward event, which we already talked about. Then the reinforcement event and the correction event. The reinforcement event is any time we want our dog to perform an action, if I want my dog to do something, sit down, come, go back to the position you just broke. Stop barking. Any action falls under a reinforcement event.

It starts the moment we are signaling to the dog. We want them to perform the behavior, and it ends the moment the dog does it. And then a correction event is anytime we’re going to add, excuse me, mostly positive punishment. So if I’m going to use a remote collar as a correction or a leash pop as a correction, that would fall under the correction event.

If we’re using pressure to get a dog to comply to a behavior, that would still be reinforcement event. ’cause with negative reinforcement, we’re still trying to get a dog to perform an action. Now for the reinforce for the, uh, teachable moment, it falls under reinforcement events. So we have teachable moments and we have commands.

So I can trigger a reinforcement event by telling a dog down. Once I say down, I’ve entered the reinforcement event, now it’s my responsibility to make sure the dog goes into the down, especially in the early stages where the dog doesn’t know the answer to the question down. I’m providing a lure or leash cue, something that gets the dog to comply to what I just asked them to do.

But a teachable moment is triggered by the dog. And I use this for all boundaries and all stays. It’s the exact same thing, regardless of it being a stay or a boundary. And this is very helpful for people. ’cause once they understand this, they’re like, oh my gosh. So that’s the same. Oh, it’s all, oh great, it’s all the same.

And they start to get to the point where they’re at that aha moment. So I pick a word that predicts negative reinforcement, and this is something I wanted to mention earlier. People often talk about markers, the condition reinforcers or condition punishers, the word or the sounds that predict the actual consequence.

The way that I define a marker is a word or sound that predicts any one of the four quadrants of opera conditioning. If I have a sound that predicts punishment or a reward or negative punishment or leash pressure, these are markers and I have a marker that predicts negative reinforcement, usually in the form of leash pressure, but sometimes it could be spatial pressure as well, just walking towards the dog.

And the reason why I use a marker for this instead of a command, ’cause like let’s say. So boundaries, dog’s not allowed on the sofa. Let’s just use that as an example, which by the way, it’s totally fine to have dogs on the sofa if you’re okay with your dogs being on the sofa. But let’s say this sofa, it’s an expensive one that you don’t want dog hair on.

Okay, great. The dog jumps on the moment. The dog jumps on the sofa. That’s when I would use my marker. That predicts negative reinforcement. Now, I used to use the word wrong and I still use it with my personal dogs, but with clients, I use Uhuh now, and the reason why I use Uhuh is because people get so caught up on the actual words that we use that they think of the dictionary definition and then they apply it that way.

I used to use the word free as a terminal marker release plus reward. I would do a lesson with someone. I would come back the following week, their dog’s in a stay. They say free, and the dog like takes off to go. Play next to the tree or something. And I go, what’s going on? I thought that was your terminal marker.

You’re supposed to reward the dog. And they’d go, no, it’s, it’s free. The dog’s free. And I said, I understand what the dictionary definition of free is, but that’s not how we were using it. So with wrong, people started to use wrong when their dogs wouldn’t comply to a command. And that was an issue. So they would tell their dog down, the dog wouldn’t comply.

They would say wrong, and then they would make the dog do it. And of course, if they’re doing that, they’re teaching the dog that the command is down wrong. And unless you want your command to be down wrong, don’t say down wrong and then do a cue to make your dog do the behavior. So that’s why I stopped using wrong with my clients, just to minimize confusion.

And the reason why I don’t say command, ’cause if the dog jumps on the sofa, we could say off the dog jumps up off, and I can cue the dog off with the leash. The dog experiences the same thing. Scenario A dog jumps up, Uhuh. What do I want the dog to do? I want the dog off the sofa. I triggered a reinforcement event.

I walk towards the dog, I grab the leash. I guide the dog off of the sofa once the dog’s off of the sofa. Good dog, but no treat. ’cause I don’t wanna create that reinforcement loop. And if the dog jumps back up again, they trigger a new reinforcement event. This is why opera conditioning is a pattern in which the dog believes they’re in control that’s relevant to them.

’cause the dog is controlling me. You jump up on the sofa. I have to comply. I have to go Uhuh. Follow through with making you come off. If I want you to learn what the expectations are without creating confusion. And then scenario B. Dog jumps up, I go off, I walk the dog and I guide the dog off with the leash.

Dog’s off the couch. Good dog. Same experience for the dog. The reason why I usually use the marker instead of the command is because we’re being reactive to the dog. If the dog surprises me and I’m not ready, ’cause we have that short window connect behavior with consequence, the dog jumps up on the sofa, turn, lays down, and then looks at me.

Now I correct the dog. The dog’s gonna think it’s for laying and looking at me, but the dog’s still gonna think, jumping up on the sofa is okay because my timing was off. Mm-hmm. So then the dog jumps up, I’m not ready. I’m trying to use a command and I go down. I mean sit, I mean off. So instead of messing up and doing that, it’s much easier to say the same word.

And then another piece of that is we use the same word in different scenarios. So the dog becomes generalized to it pretty quickly. They learn, oh, go back to the previous position, or stop what I’m doing and look to the human for guidance. So same thing, dog breaks the stay. Uhuh. What do I want the dog to do?

I want the dog to go back to the stay, whether it’s a climb, stay, play, stay down, stay. And once the dog’s back in the position, turn off the pressure. Good dog. Now, remember how I said I like to have certain milestones and things for people to look for what I have them look for for this, because of course this won’t develop full reliability and if the dog learns that there’s certain opportunities where they get away with it.

This is of course why when people say, oh, I leave the house and then my dog does something that I don’t want them to do. Well, it’s ’cause the dog learned not to do it while you were there. But the moment you leave, the dog doesn’t. Dog’s like, well this is great. I just do it when you’re not here. And that’s why we set up cameras and things like that.

So the dogs believe we’re always watching them, just like we always want our dogs to believe that we could pay them. I don’t want my dog to think I can’t pay because then I’m less likely to get a behavior that’s done with enthusiasm instead of behavior that’s done through force. Could we get dogs to do everything by force?

Of course we can. One of the things that always drives me nuts and when people are like, I don’t wanna bribe my dog, I, and I go, you mean pay? Bribing is the same thing as pain. It’s just that bribing is something that you do illegally. And we’re not asking our dogs to do anything illegal. I’m not asking them to talk to the judge for me so I don’t get in trouble.

It’s a payment and it’s like, why do we switch to a variable reinforcement schedule? Because that’s the strongest schedule based on research to prevent the extinction of a behavior. Behavior prevent, doesn’t guarantee the extinction of a behavior. If I stop rewarding entirely, the behavior will either go away or I will have to fall back to using force.

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So going back to teachable moments, so it unlocks the teachable moments. Now this means I can work on stays and I can work on boundaries. Something that I picked up from my good buddy, excellent trainer, Robert Cabral, is what he calls the binary dog.

And I started having clients implement that. Once we get down the leash pressure, then inside the house I ask them, I say, create some sort of boundary for your dog. If you don’t have one, create one just so you can practice. And then I have them do capturing. So I have them do capturing when their dog does something that they like.

So the dog looks at them, sits, lays down, goes to their bed. I say, this is an opportunity to help condition your dog to the marker. And it’s an opportunity for you to practice reward events. And what this does is it. Gets the dog to create rewards without you asking them to perform behaviors. Michael Ellis talks about this a lot.

The dog learns that their behavior can drive the production of the reward instead of the reward. Driving the production of the behavior and capturing is very powerful for that. And then the other side is using those teachable moments to start showing the dog boundaries. Now with all these, what’s going to end up happening is eventually, and, and you guys will probably be able to guess it, if the dog jumps up on the sofa and I say Uhuh and I guide the dog off after enough of those, what do you think happens after I say Uhuh?

I would hope the dog’s getting off. 

Yeah, the dog’s gonna learn the pattern. The dog’s gonna get off. Once I see that for me and the way that I like to train, that’s my signal to switch to a correction event. So now the next time the dog jumps up on the sofa, it’s not going to be an Uhuh. It’s going to be a no.

And a no is my marker for positive punishment. Now, something else that’s important for people that are just getting into dog training, just like a dog can be classically conditioned to a sound that predicts a reward, a dog can be classically conditioned to a sound that predicts punishment. And within the system and the way that I train, there are a few very common responses that we see.

Number one most common to a dog that’s conditioned to the word no is what I call instant compliancy. And I’m sure you both have seen this plenty of times. You say no, and the dog does what you wanted them to do. The moment you say, oh, oh, I’ll go into the down. I’ll jump off the sofa. That’s what I call instant compliancy.

The other one I call evasion. You say no, and you’ve probably seen this with some dogs where they take off, they go, I’m outta here. You’re not correcting me. Another one is what I call freeze in place. Pretty self-explanatory. You say, no dog freezes, like, ah, crap. And then the last one. Is running to the human.

Now, those are the most common. Now, of course there’s variations. Uh, you guys have probably seen dogs even bark at the handler for saying, no, that one I find funny. Or the dog’s like f you after they say no. But the most common is that instant co compliancy. And I always point this out because when the dog jumps up on the sofa the next time and the client switches to no, that’s if they want full reliability.

Again, I don’t force my clients to do anything I say, if you don’t wanna add punishment to your dog, you can still have pretty reliable training just stopping at the teachable moment point where you’re still getting the dog to do it. But you have to be a little bit more consistent and a little bit longer on the timeline to have more reliability.

But you can still get there depending on the dog. But let’s say we’re switching to the correction event, I let them know when the dog jumps up. In fact, I usually ask them a question first. I say, okay, now the dog jumps up on the sofa. You say no, and the dog jumps off right away. What do you do? The most common answers I hear is, oh, the dog did what we wanted.

Praise the dog. Give the dog a reward. Well then we actually didn’t follow through with the correction. And the analogy I use for this, it’s the same thing as if, if I’m driving my car and I’m speeding and I see those red and blue lights start flashing behind me, that’s a marker for us. The moment you see it, oh shit, and you go to slow down.

When you go to slow down, does a police officer ever drive past you and go, good job and take off. No, like best case scenario, you’re getting negative punishment because you’re gonna be late and you get a warning or fix it. Fix it. Ticket. But often positive punishment, ’cause we get a ticket, but you might call that negative punishment because they’re actually taking money and time from you.

But nonetheless, there’s a consequence. The moment you see those red and blue lights. It’s the same for our dogs. The moment they hear no, we enter the correction event. And just like I was talking before with the overshadowing. Have that half second pause, at least when we’re getting them conditioned. When they’re conditioned, you just say no and start walking towards them.

They’re gonna understand it. And even if the dog jumps off, we give the correction. But here’s the thing I also like to point out to my clients. These are the different things your dog’s going to do, and this is how you want to respond based on what your dog does. So if the dog instantly complies, I say, you walk over, you give the dog the correction.

After the correction, the correction event is over. And if the dog’s off the sofa, hey, good job. Way to go, buddy. If the dog freezes in place. So you say no, and the dog freezes and you walk over and you give the correction, the correction’s done. But now the dog’s still on the sofa. So now what do I want? I want the dog off of the sofa that falls under a reinforcement event.

So I’m gonna ask the dog to get off. So I’m gonna go off and then I’m going to guide the dog off, and this is the exact process I follow with the state dog. Breaks the state, Uhuh, take ’em back, eventually switch it to the no, then they get the punishment. That’s where we get the reliability. And then being careful of not trying to create that reinforcement loop.

So now what about commands? 

So can we pause there for one second? Yeah, for sure. So with the couch, you said, you know, go up and give the correction. What does that look like with the average dog? 

Yeah, man, that’s a good question. It really depends on the dog. So I like to call this the dog’s bank account.

Now this where it gets into what I was saying at the beginning, where as trainers we’ll often say things like, dog training is not cookie cutter, and this is what that means. Like if I, this is why a remote training collar, for example, has a scale of zero to a hundred or zero to 1 27. ’cause each dog is going to be different.

Not only is each dog going to be different, but each dog is going to be different to themselves in different scenarios. A correction level inside the house is gonna be significantly lower than what the dog may need when they’re highly aroused or if they have adrenaline flowing through their blood, which is a painkiller.

So the correction level is going to change based on the scenario and the context. That’s the same thing and the tools that we’re using so often with my own dogs, I very rarely use prong collars with my own dogs. I just use remote collars. I think they’re better, they’re more effective, they’re safer with clients if they’re struggling.

I will often recommend a prong collar because it’s easier for someone to use in the early stages than a remote collar. Remote collar just takes more skill. But before they even use a correctional tool, like a prong collar, I have prerequisites where they have to be really good at reward-based training first.

So the foundation is always reward-based because if their timing sucks with the rewards, then there’s no way they’re going to, they should correct their dogs. There’s an example I always point out. If you go online and you look up Frankie Inside Edition, it was a dog that I worked. It was a Bull Terrier, and they said it was a demon dog and it was highly aggressive.

And the woman that owned the dog, she originally wanted Caesar Milan to train the dog. And this was right after I did the show, rescue Dog to Super Dog. And Caesar Milan, from my understanding, said he would do it, but he needed to have control of all the footage. And they said, no, you don’t have control of the footage.

And he said, I’m not gonna do it then. And so I was her second pick and they sent me footage of her with the dog. She had been bitten by the dog over 20 times. It shows a video of her dad, an older gentleman holding a cane, and the cane is all chewed up on the end and it’s like, what were you shoving that in the dog’s face?

Like, what’s going on here? And when I saw the videos that they sent, now I wanna be very clear that this woman that owned this dog, she cared very much about the dog. That’s why she was trying to get the dog fixed. She was doing everything she could. And the mistakes she made were honest mistakes. But these mistakes, depending on the dog, will have different levels of consequences.

And with this specific dog, it created a lot of frustration because her timing was off with punishments. She was punishing at the wrong time. The dog would comply, the dog would get punished, the dog would be like, fine, what do you want? And then the dog would get punished. So the dog said, finally, F you.

I’m biting you. When I had that dog in for training. Not a single time did that dog show any aggression at all towards me because the communication system was so clear. I had a point to bringing that up. But to answer your question, if I’m using again by this point, I should know the sensitivity level of the dog.

And I usually correct at a level that I think is adequate for that dog. So if the dog is more sensitive, then the dog’s probably going to be on a martingale. So I either use a martingale collar, a prong collar, remote training collar, or a combination. So I walk over. Now if it’s inside the house, I like to use the tab during what I call house training or house manners.

So the dog has a collar on and they have a short tab. Now what I do, I don’t buy tabs because I think they’re overpriced, like 25 bucks for a six inch leather tab. No, I’m not doing that. I just go on Amazon. I buy a bag of 30 uh, slip leads that are super cheap, and then I cut ’em the length that I want and I tie it to the dog’s collar.

So it looks cheap. It is cheap, but it works for what I’m doing. And if some reason I’ve. Not, I’m not paying attention to the dog and they chew it. I’m not gonna be upset ’cause I lost maybe 50 cents. Not a big deal. So I have that on. So that gives me the ability to do a little pop. Now the dog continues to do the behavior.

’cause now we’re talking about perception, what we were talking about earlier. Positive punishment is very much dependent on the dog’s perception of the correction. I try to start on the lower end, especially in an environment where there’s not a lot of arousal. Like there’s not a lot going on inside the house when the dog jumps up on the sofa, and if the dog is already classically conditioned to the word no, we’re gonna see that change of behavior and that dog’s gonna get that feeling associated because classical conditioning affects emotion.

That’s why we do counter conditioning. It changes the emotional response to something. So if I go to the dog, if I say no, the dog already knows, I’m not happy with that. And even if I give a light correction, in a lot of cases, that’ll be enough. But if the dog continues the behavior, then I will increase it.

And the thing with a flat collar. This is the analogy I use for this. Let’s say the flat collar can only give a maximum level of a $50 correction. So the leash pop, the hardest I can do without hurting the dog and using it as punishment could be a $50 ticket. But what if the dog needs $150 ticket to stop the behavior?

Well, now my choices are either A, I give multiple pops, which will work for some dogs. So I say no, and I do three $50 pops on the collar. That might work for some dogs. Or I increase to a prong collar or remote collar. And again, I prefer the remote collar. So I know this is a long answer to the question, but we’re trying to make it where the correction is not so low that the dog doesn’t care.

It’s not so high that we create avoidance. It’s at. The right level to where the dog learns not to repeat the behavior. It gets us reliability without creating any sort of fear or avoidance. And this is what makes corrections so difficult, and this is often one of the reasons why I recommend to people when they reach out to me and they say, Hey, I’m thinking about doing a board and train at like someone who’s not a dog trainer, right?

Someone who’s like, Hey, there’s this facility, they do board and training. What do you think? And often I say, unless you really know the trainer, and this might be a little controversial, but unless you really know the trainer, I often recommend pure positive. For board and train. And the reason why is one of the things I’ve seen with less experienced trainers that are trying to get fast results in a short amount of time, they use way too much compulsion.

And they might get the dog to do it, but the dog looks terrified, their tails tucked, their ears are back. And it’s like that’s the bad use of compulsion. And that can often happen when someone’s trying to rush and get results. The thing with dog training, everyone wants to get to the destination, but it’s all about the journey.

And we have to do the journey the right way to not create any of those issues. So I say unless you absolutely trust the trainer, I would have, like if I was, if I didn’t know someone who. Was training. I was like, you know what? This next dog, I don’t want to train. I’m just gonna pay these guys to do it. I would pay them to do the pure positive, teach the dog the reps, do the behaviors, and I will add the punishment so I can get reliability.

That way I can make sure it’s done the right way, because again, that’s really important. It’s one of the reasons why I started implementing what I call the adjustment period to my stay train. If I get a dog that comes in and that dog’s cautious or fearful or nervous or aggressive, I build the relationship first.

And if I have a really fearful dog, that relationship building period could take three weeks. But if I start training the dog when they’re in that negative emotional state, we’re creating a negative association to something we want the dog to enjoy. So now I take a dog that. Could have had some really good potential.

And to use a common term is I poisoned everything by starting when the dog was in this fearful or nervous state. So point being corrections can be useful, but a reason why I think a lot of people are cautious or hesitant or have a negative outlook on it is the improper use of it. ’cause done well, it could be really good, but done poorly.

It could create a lot of issues. Did that answer that question? 

It did, yeah. I just wanted people to be at a picture in their mind. What does that look, what does the end of that process look like? Right. Yeah. And if I’m. 

Sorry, I I didn’t mean to cut you off there. No, no worries. Um, and if I’m using a remote collar, then that, of course depends on where the dog is in the training because we don’t want, which is commonly referred to as the super, uh, uh, superstitious association.

So if I have a dog, there’s a process for the remote collar. We put it on and off randomly. We habituate them to it. We neutralize the tool so they don’t recognize it. And when we get lazy with it, and admittedly I’ve gotten lazy with it with my own dogs, it’s like they know when they have it on and they know when they don’t.

And if you don’t care about that, that’s fine, but. If you care, if you’re trying to compete or you want your dog to perform really well without the collar, then you habituate them to it. You put it on and off. They don’t associate to anything. It doesn’t mean anything. And then when we add a correction with a leash, we can give the dog direction.

If my dog breaks a sit and I pop the leash up, that’s a clear signal to put the dog back into the sit. Especially since I’ve already done leash pressure training, I’m giving direction with the correction. But with a remote collar, it doesn’t give that direction. So we provide it with the leash in the initial stages when we’re using it for obedience, which is much different than if we’re using it for a behavioral issue.

But I also warn people. 

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Don’t use a, there’s so, there’s lots of guidelines with remote college.

You know, we can come back to this if we have time. ’cause there’s a lot on remote training collars. So now we go back. If I want to add more than just sit. Down and getting the dog to walk forward, which is the, that’s what most people need. I want my dog to sit, lay down, come to me, go to its bed. With those three things you can guide a dog to do.

Most behaviors, usually with dogs that I’m gonna have in a staying trainer, I’m working for a while after I teach the leash pressure. ’cause again, that unlocks teachable moments. So now I have that within my toolkit that I can use throughout the day. I can have the dog out. I can pretty much do most things with the dog in a low arousal environment until the dog gets more training.

And that’s something I often talk about as well, which I call environmental difficulty assessment. Now, dog trainers are familiar with this, but most people aren’t. It’s the reason why people say. They tell their dog to sit, their dog doesn’t sit, and they go, you know this, you know this. It’s like, no, the dog doesn’t know it.

Not in that situation. The dog’s not generalized to the training yet. And so I do a scale of zero to five. Of course, that’s just a random number I picked, I thought, zero to five work you could do zero to 10, whatever works best for you. But I have my clients rate the environment in which they’re working their dog in, and I say the level of difficulty is based on distractions that pull your dog’s focus away from you.

So the more things in the environment that are pulling your dog’s attention and focus away from you, that increases the difficulty of the environment. So you wanna start in a level zero, no distractions, nothing. Pulling the dog away. You’re the interesting thing in that dog’s world in that moment. And it’s very easy to get the dog to focus on you.

It’s like it’s the reason why you don’t try to teach a class to a bunch of. Eight year olds and have a TV playing their favorite show. Good luck getting them to listen. They’re not ready for that level of distraction yet, and then gradually working their way up. But going back, I go back to the luring and I add more luring.

So I like to do all kinds of luring. I do lots of spins. So if we think about the dog going from the sit front position into the heel position, for me that’s just a, A 180, that’s all it is. It’s a 180 spin. And getting the dog to understand those mechanics, we do it Lots of spins and I, I picked that up from Nino, from STS Canine.

I’m sure you guys are familiar with him. I used to always use the Pivot bowl. Then I signed up for his MVP course. Haven’t finished it yet, but a lot of it is just getting the dog to spin and then also working on power steering. A term I picked up from Forrest Mickey. So if I take my hand and I rotate it, most dogs, if I have food in it, when I go to rotate, they’re gonna try to go around the hand to try to get to the food.

So one of the things that I do is I take my hand and I lock it up against my legs. ’cause I’m creating a barrier on the left and right side of my hand. So the only place that the dog can get the food is in the center of my hand. They can’t go around. And as I place it in between my legs, I’ll start to pivot in a circle to where if my hands were directly above a quarter on the ground.

It would stay in that position as I rotate. So I’m simulating just rotating my wrist. And by having those barriers, it makes it very easy for the dog to learn to pivot their backend. Then I can catch the dog with my hand and easily flip them into heel position effortlessly because we set up these foundational skills.

So I do more luring after that, that’s when I start adding the command. Now I do the implied stay, but I let again, my clients choose. I say the implied stay means you tell your dog to go into a position and they must maintain that position until you give them a release word, a new command or a terminal marker.

So they have to be released, or you can do the verbal stay where unless you say stay, they can jump outta position whenever they want. And both work. It’s all personal preference, but something else I wanna point out. As you notice, I, I didn’t get to add in commands till now, and there’s been a bit of confusion on this, and Ivan and myself talked about this because there’s a group of people that say, don’t name it till you love it.

Then Ivan says, you can name it as long as you can get the dog to do the behavior. Also, anytime someone is referencing something that another trainer says, always go back to the source. ’cause I could be missing a word. I could be changing it ever so slightly. So don’t take this as coming directly from Ivan.

Take this as. I haven’t said something that went through my filter and now you’re hearing it from me, so it could be slightly different. But the idea is once you can get the dog to perform the behavior, then you can add the command. Because if we’re doing something that requires a little bit more finesse and flexibility and mobility in the dog’s movement, like flipping into heel position, those dynamic movements, well, a dog has to practice those mechanics.

Just like an athlete has to practice movements within their sport. So they’re not gonna be able to do it beautifully right away. But if every time I give the dog the answer and over time it gets better and better, by the time the dog is performing it on the verbal, they’re doing it the way we love anyways.

Now, the mistake that people made from interpreting this information was, oh, you can just start naming the command right away, which. You have to point out that the dog has to do the behavior, because if someone thinks, oh, I can start naming the command right away, and they start going Sit, sit, sit, sit, sit, and the dog finally sits, then what we’re doing is we’re creating what’s known as learned to relevance.

The dog is learning to ignore the word, or I’m treating the command as Sit, sit, sit. And then the dog waits. Oh, he didn’t say it that other time. Oh, okay. So to be consistent, we want the words to be relevant to the dog. Relevance is very important, and the more I repeat it without any sort of consequence, good or bad, the dog learns to ignore it.

And I know I’ve already referenced Michael Ellis a few times, but he has a great analogy for this. There’s a reason why your dog gets excited when somebody knocks on the door, rings a doorbell, and the dog couldn’t care less. If your phone rings, because what happens when your phone rings? First time dog hears it, but then you’re on the phone, you’re ignoring the dog.

The dog quickly learns that’s not relevant to them, and when the phone rings, they completely ignore it. We don’t want our verbal communication to be something the dog ignores. So if we wanna communicate with our dog, but we don’t wanna put the pressure on ourselves to make sure we follow through with a reward, reinforcement or correction event, then we do what I like to call informal communication.

So a lot of times when I’m working with a new dog and even my own dogs, I talk to ’em. I talk to my dogs quite a bit. Now I can understand when someone says, don’t talk to your dog all the time. If you’re trying to work on a skill, like building your physical communication with the dog, ’cause that’s how a dog learns.

But a lot of times I might be like, Hey, come on guys, let’s go. Hey, go, go lay down, knock it off. Whatcha doing? Whatcha doing? I just, I talk to him like pretty normal and. That if they ignore that, it doesn’t matter because it’s not having a negative impact on my commands. So I try to be very strict with my commands.

Now, how do we know too? This is a common thing that people have said on my videos, like, oh, you’re just giving the dog a bunch of treats. Oh, I could do that. And in the beginning, as you guys know, when we start teaching a new behavior, we’re using, ’cause there’s different reinforcement schedules and there’s rate of reinforcement, but we’re on a continuous reinforcement schedule.

We’re rewarding every single correct repetition. How do we know when to switch if we’re going to switch to a variable? And that’s usually what I do. I’ll go to continuous to variable. I don’t do any of the other sort of reinforcement schedules. Like I won’t do one reward. No reward, one reward. No reward. I won’t do the time rewards where it’s like 30 seconds.

Now I can reward for the first good rep. I keep it simple. Continuous to variable. Well, the way that I switch to variable, I used to tell people that when your dog is responding to the verbal command alone without the help of the physical cue, that’s when you can switch over to spacing out the rewards.

But what I noticed was it would take people way too long to get to that point. Their timing’s not that good. Maybe they’re inconsistent, or the dog just takes a long time to pick up the commands. So now what I do is I start randomizing the rewards. Once I can get the dog to do all the behaviors with the physical cue, primarily through leash cues or food lures.

So then I can start chaining commands together. I can say down, I can lure the dog into the down sit, lure the dog into the sit heel, lure the dog into the heel center, lure the dog into the center. Then release and reward the dog, and then changing the reward event based on how much I ask the dog to perform.

So if I ask my dog to work for a while, I’m gonna make the reward event a little bit more worthwhile for the dog. But of course, the dog has to have the belief, they have to have the hope that there’s a possibility for a reward to come up and chaining it that way gave me the opportunity to start adding, uh, to randomize the rewards more quickly, while still getting some pretty nice results.

Now at this point, we already know how to get reliability for. Violating stays and violating boundaries. It’s the same in every environment. This is another thing I tell my clients, I’m like, just ’cause your dog is at the level of receiving a correction for breaking a downs stay in the house does not mean your dog is at the level for receiving a correction for a Downs stay outside.

So each environment is its own separate thing. You have to go through the process in each environment. Now of course, as the dog gets generalized, they will start to perform more quickly in each one of these environments and you won’t have to do as many reps before you know it. Dog’s fully generalized and they’re doing all the behaviors in all the environments.

Okay, great. So with commands, someone says, okay, well how do I get reliability with the commands? We know we have the luring and we have the leash cues, but just because a dog understands luring, and just because a dog understands how to follow leash pressure doesn’t mean they’re going to do it if they don’t want to.

And a common thing that will happen, we got the dog doing everything inside the house, and we go on the first walk, we take the dog on a walk, we stop. Maybe we do an automatic sit when halted, and now we’re going to ask the dog to down. Well, we already know that the dog’s not going to be at a level proficient enough to warrant a fair correction, because what I look for for correcting non-compliance to commands is I want approximately 80% proficiency on that command in that environment.

So I already know the dog’s not at 80% proficiency, so I’m already going to give the dog the answer. So I say down, I wait that half second pause. If the dog does it, great, I’m gonna enter a reward event and we’re gonna continue our walk. But more likely than not, the dog’s not going to do it. So then I take the food and I go right down past the dog’s face and oh my gosh, it’s not catching the dog’s staring at a squirrel in the tree.

The food. Has no value. Uhoh, what do we do? We triggered a reinforcement event, and the guidelines of the reinforcement event is it’s not over until the dog does the behavior. So of course, this is where we fall back, we grab the leash, and now we can use the leash pressure. Well uhoh. The dog’s resisting the leash pressure.

The dog knows the leash pressure, but the dog’s resisting. Again, just ’cause the dog knows it doesn’t mean they’re going to comply to it. Now when I teach it, I start with low pressure. But if I’m in a situation like this and the dog’s ignoring it, even though it is a new environment, I have to follow through and get the dog to do the behavior.

So I will gradually increase the pound of pressure that I’m using. So I start light, but then I start to pull harder, harder, harder, until eventually I am physically pulling the dog down. But then their butt’s still up. So the butt’s still up and I’m waiting. Now, I could apply a little bit of pressure there if I want, or I can just wait.

Eventually the dog’s going to go into the down. Once the dog goes into the down, I release the pressure. I enter a reward event. Yeah, good job. And then we go back into a walk. So I give the dog a few rewards, couple pieces of food, if the dog wants it. If not, maybe some praise. Maybe I use Premack principle and just let it look at the squirrel more.

If it’s not reacting and it’s not causing an issue, depending on what the dog values. Then we go back in the walk. Now, the next time I ask the dog to down, we get a little less resistance. And then the next one, a little less till after three, four reps. Now the dog’s going into the down because they learned it’s significantly better to comply than to resist and go through that pressure.

But what a lot of people do in the early stages is they give the command to a dog. In an environment where the dog is distracted and they don’t follow through at the reinforcement event, and then of course the dog learns within this situation. I don’t have to listen to you. I can ignore it, but they’re worried.

And if a reinforcement event is taking a while, what do people tend to do? Then they start to repeat the command. Oh, the dog’s not going into the down. So I better start saying down more, down, down, down, which is unnecessary because we’re already in the event. The timing that matters is when we say the command and when we enter the reinforcement event.

As long as we don’t get distracted and leave that event, then the dog is going to be able to connect it together, even if it’s a very long timeline. I’ll give you an extreme example. So my realtor, when I was in Oregon, their dog was left at a boarding place when they went on a trip. And this boarding place really sucks because I guess something happened and they were like, your dog can’t stay here.

It got like too rough with another dog. Didn’t get into a fight, no actual or aggression, but they kicked the dog basically out of the boarding facility. And so she asked if I could watch the dog till they came back. So I said, sure, no big deal. Someone picked up the dog, dropped the dog off. First time I met, met the dog.

It’s a large dog. I don’t remember the burrito. Some sort of, um, it wasn’t a bull mastiff, but. Maybe it was, it was close to the size. It was a larger dog. No issues though. It wasn’t aggressive or anything. But I hadn’t had any relationship develop with this dog, and I wasn’t working with the dog yet. And the next morning I get up and my wife had already let the dog out in the backyard, and this was a pretty big backyard, lots of hills and trees and stuff.

And so I went out there and I made the mistake of telling the dog to come to me because they gave me a list of commands the dog already knew. And I just said the, without having a relationship or anything built, I just told the dog to come. And I was like, you know what? I’m committed and I’m gonna test out my own outlook of training.

I don’t like to use the word theory because people often misuse the word theory. Theory is the closest thing to a scientific fact that we can possibly prove, but people say theory as if it’s a, uh, hypothesis. So I’m walking, so I say, all right, I started the reinforcement event and I start walking towards a dog.

I don’t run because of course, if I run. It’s gonna become a game and the dog’s gonna run around and play. I walk at them like I’m an AI programmed robot. No, uh, very slow moving, heat seeking rocket. And I just walk towards them and I have a straight face. I’m not smiling, I’m not mad. I’m just walking. And the dog kept walking away and I just kept following the dog, following the dog.

And then eventually the dog stopped and he is like, all right, this is she, she’s like, this is a little weird. I walked up, I got her, and I was like, good. Nice job. Good girl. We walked in, I took her inside. Next time I called her when she was outside, she came right away. Same dog. When she was first dropped off, I had another trainer working with me and I had a lesson I had to leave for.

I had to put her in the crate and I wasn’t going to just leave her out and hope for the best. That’s insane. So we have the crate, I put the leash through the back end and I hooked it to the dog and I had the trainer pull the leash that way, and I grabbed the dog and pushed, and again, it was a big dog and I held the dog’s collar and I pushed the dog in while he pulled, and the dog fought pretty hard.

Like it was tough. Two guys getting this dog inside of the crate, but I got the dog in the crate. Good dog closed the door. The next time I asked the dog to go in the crate, it went right in into the crate. What happens with a lot of people is the dogs try to do things, and often we call this being defiant or stubborn.

The dog’s just trying to figure out their world. They’re trying to figure out what works. And so that dog staying away from me worked. It would’ve continued that behavior if resisting the. Me putting them in the crate worked, then the dog would’ve resisted even harder the next time. But since we followed through now, big thing that I have to point out is I try very hard not to use, which is often referred to as social pressure, meaning I try not to ever yell or get angry or get frustrated with the dog.

I don’t like the idea of the dog thinking. Now, of course I’m human, but I don’t like the dog thinking that I’m mad at them. And I say I’m human because yes, sometimes I get frustrated or get annoyed. We all do. The other day I was working. I was halfway through editing a podcast episode for my YouTube channel.

I forgot to save, and my German Shepherd with his happy, goofy attitude, ran through, caught the wires, and unplugged everything. Lost like an hour and a half of work. I was a little irritated by that. But I try not to show any frustration or anger to the dogs. I compare this to Juujitsu when I’m training my dogs.

They’re a sparring partner in this game that we’re playing. And there’s times where corrections might happen, but it’s not done in a, a malicious or out of anger if I came in. So I trained under one of the best juujitsu grapplers in the world. Lucas Barbosa, look him up. He can beat. 99.999999999% of the human population.

Nicest guy you’ll meet. If I came in and we’re sparring and he submits me. I’m not mad, I’m not upset, I’m not fearful of him. We slap hands and we go, of course he’s gonna beat me like he’s a world champion. Now, if I came into his dojo and he started yelling at me, ran at me, did a double a takedown, then threw me into arm bar out of anger, that’s a completely different experience.

Now I’m afraid of him. I’m cautious. I’m not going back to that gym. No way. Same thing. Action wise. Two totally different experience because of the emotions that are behind it. So I always say, try your best not to let your emotions affect the way you communicate with your dog. When I went to the Tom Rose School as a student, they suggested, if you’re mad, just start playing fetch with your dog.

So then you can classically condition your dog to when you’re mad, they think you’re playing fetch and they’ll get happy. So we don’t wanna put that, ’cause again, it might put them in a state of fear, nervousness. Now you become a threat and they’re focused on the threat instead of actually focused on learning.

So correcting non-compliance to a command. If we have 80% proficiency, and I’ll try to do this quickly ’cause we don’t have too much time left, but if the dog’s 80% proficient on the command in the environment, then this is the sequence that I use. We give the dog the command. If the dog blows it off first, we have to make sure the dog hears it.

So in a lot of cases, if the dog’s kind of doing their own thing, sniffing, whatever, I’ll say the dog’s name first, Ari, my dog looks at me. Come now I get the dog to come to me instead of just saying it and assuming they heard it but they didn’t. And then correcting them for non-compliance. I think that would be unfair.

So we have to make sure they hear it and then. After that half second pause, within that half second pause, I should be able to tell whether or not the dog’s going to do it. If I say sit and my dog’s like, well, I know at that moment before I even entered the reinforcement event that the dog’s not going to do it.

The moment I see it, that’s when I say no. But of course, just like before, we’re going to see a change of behavior. When we say no, if I say down, my dog doesn’t do it, and I say No, and my dog lays down quickly, you’re still getting the correction. So I give the dog the correction after the correction. If the dog’s still in the down, good dog.

If the dog’s not in the down, then I repeat down and I assist the dog, meaning I use. Negative reinforcement. ’cause I don’t want to re, I don’t wanna create, again, a reinforcement loop. So I’ll use the leash or some sort of negative reinforcement cue to get the dog to do the behavior. Then once they’re in the behavior, good dog.

Again, no reward if the dog gives me the wrong answer. This is what I tell my clients as well, and this is how I do it. Now, I don’t punish dogs for giving me the wrong answer. Some people do, and if you’re competing or something like that, I understand it. But with my dog’s mistakes, I don’t punish. So if I tell my dog down and my dog sits instead.

So I compare this to asking a little kid something. If I go to a little kid and I go, Hey, what’s two plus two? And that child says three. Well, that’s the wrong answer. So either A, I’m gonna ask the question again. What’s two plus two, four. Hey, there you go. Or I’m just going to give them the answer. What’s two plus two?

It’s three. That’s four. And that’s the same thing I do with the dog Sit. The dog lays down. I just lure the dog into the sit. That’s just giving them the answer. They gave me the wrong answer. I gave ’em the right answer or. I’ll ask the question again. Now, some people might think, well, aren’t you repeating the command at this point?

Yes, but it doesn’t negatively impact the relevance of the command. That’s why we don’t repeat. We don’t repeat because we don’t want it to become irrelevant. But if I say, sit my dog downs, or I say down and my dog sits obvious based on the dog’s response, that that word is very relevant to them, they just gave me the wrong response.

So asking it again is not going to damage the effectiveness of that command. Then the dog gives me the right answer. Yay, good job. If the dog doesn’t gimme the right answer again, then I’m just gonna help ’em. I’m not gonna keep asking ’cause I don’t want them to keep making the mistake over and over. Now, if I say down and the dog blows me off and I say No, and the dog freezes and I give the dog the correction, the dog is still standing after that.

Then again, I would say down. And I would assist with the leash queue. And then basically, we’re doing this in all kinds of different environments until we get the reliability that we want. And as I said before, it’s the same governing principles for all disciplines and training. Even if we’re doing bite work, if I’m teaching a dog where to bite, let’s say I’m doing bicep PSA, well that’s an action, but it’s also a reward event.

’cause those dogs enjoy biting, but I’m showing them how to do it in a very specific way. Bite in this location. Have a full bite. Hold on tight, don’t slip, don’t chew. All these little things still fall under. Those three key events. If I’m training a service dog and I want that dog to retrieve an item or hit on and off the light switch or um, provide counter support or counterbalance, we still do the same steps.

We get the dog’s focus and engagement. Then we show the dog through some kind of physical cue what we want them to do. Okay? I want the dog to hit on and off the light switch. I have to get them to reach up and paw for it. That’s the problem solving part. What do I need to do to get that? Or if I want the dog to provide that counterbalance, the dog has to understand to resist pressure instead of going with it.

So then I push on the dog’s back and the dog resists, and I mark that and I reward that. And gradually I ask for more resistance until the dog can perform the job. If we’re doing search and rescue, the dog has to find someone. They’re searching for tracking, but the process is the same. We adjust for each dog based on the goals and the dog’s temperament, disposition, motivation, perseverance, all these things.

This is how we adjust. And the trainers that are the best are the ones that can read the dogs the best to adjust what’s appropriate for each dog to maximize the results in which that dog is capable of. 

About it. Well, that is a lot, a lot of good info for the listeners. I wanna hear someone repeat all that back to their clients.

We’ll give them, 

well, that’s done over a couple sessions, right? And, and again, I give them written material and video references, but again, I want them to know what to do in each situation. So if they’re in a situation, they have an idea of what to do. And if they don’t, hopefully I’ve taught them the science well enough to where they can make an educated decision.

So I think that’s a good segue. You just mentioned videos. Where can people find out more about you and I already mentioned you’ve got a lot of content and a lot of great videos. I would suggest people watch where should they go? What’s their first stop? 

Yeah, I really appreciate that. So where I post most of my content is going to be on my YouTube channel.

So that’s just Nate Schumer. If you look up my name, you’re going to find it. It’s the same for all the different social media platforms. My website is nate schomer.com and I also have a course on sit day learn that’s available and right now it is the number one highest ranked course on the platform. So I’m very proud of that.

Thank, congrats. But Michael Ellis is, I appreciate that. But Michael Ellis’ course just got on there not that long ago, so he’ll probably pass me up in no time. 

Alright, well thank you for coming on. Appreciate you Nate. I really appreciate you guys listening. As 

you can tell, I really love talking about this stuff.