PUPPY ONE CLASS
Here at Root River Retrievers, we offer classes for you and your pup to come together to learn and create good habits that last a lifetime. Our classes are designed to help you over-come common challanges, better communication skills, as well as how to teach basic obedience and its concepts so your pup understands without confusion and, of course, learning the importance of shaping good behaviors with practical application.
- Dog training is really about teachable moments!
Taking advantage of “small moments” for learning is, in most cases, a far more affective training method than grueling training sessions. You are able to train throughout the day in various rooms of the house, enforcing basic manners and good behavior (some obedience skills too!) as well as in different life circumstances/scenarios. These teachable moments are also when your puppy/dog determines how high (or low) your expectaions are and how much weight your rules carry. These small moments are probaly less than 30 seconds long!
Dogs are always learning, so the question is, WHAT is your puppy learning?
- PRACTICALLY ALL CANINE BEHAVIOR (GOOD OR BAD) IS FORMED BY THE WAY YOU LIVE WITH YOUR DOG.
A common misconception among many dog owners is that obedience training is the key to a well-behaved dog. But very little obedience training is needed for a well-behaved dog. What you do with him, what you don’t do with him, what you allow him to do, what you don’t allow him to do…these are all messages to your dog.
Send the right message and you won’t have a problem with your dog. Send the wrong message and you will have problems. It’s that simple. How you live with your dog everyday will determine how he behaves in your family. - ONE-AND-DONE
In our classes, we use the “one-and-done” style training, which mitigates some of the stress from a longer training session. This method is fantastic for creating good memory in association with a command well done. You can actually go backwards in training without some form of rewarding brake or “reset” even with treat rewards.
For example, imagine yourself in a foreign country and you unable to understand the language. If you had to learn to do a job and the instructor kept having you complete the same menial task over and over, you might begin to think you clearly aren’t doing it right, or what is the point in continuing. Obviously, dogs do not have reasoning, but it’s the same reaction…why bother continuing over and over if there is no brake?
One and done simply means this: when you are teaching your dog something, especially young pups, you wouldn’t continue asking them to repeat that same trick or command after they have executed it nicely. You would reward and release your puppy, allowing them to relax, run around and use his nose and lose focus for about a minute or so, before asking again. A brake after a job well done is not only rewarding in and of itself, but it allows the pup to decompress after his job is completed. His memory for the command is strengthened as well.
Our puppy class will show you how this is done to benefit the most from your training time.
