Lecture: dressage du chien

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How to train your dog

This is our new dog, Cookie. As you can see, Cookie is has no fine pedigree, he’s what we call a mongrel, a dog who is a mixture of different breeds. We got him from the local animal rescue, it seems that he had been abandonned and had tried to move in with an elderly lady in a nearby village.

Cookie is 4 years old, so he’s no pup. There’s a saying in English: ‘you can’t teach an old dog new tricks’. I wanted to find out if this was true – if it would be possible to train Cookie to at least obey simple commands like ‘sit’ ‘stay’ ‘down’ or even ‘shake hands’. More importantly, if the children have Cookie on a lead, I wanted to stop him from pulling on the lead or running off when he sees a rabbit or something else interesting to chase.

Traditional dog-training methods use punishment as a motivater. If the dog pulls on the lead, you yank the lead hard so the dog feels pain. There are even ‘choke’ collars that strangle the dog if he doesn’t do as he’s told. The problem with this type of training, though, is that the dog is only obedient when there is a threat of punishment, when he’s alone or not on his lead, he has no reason not to behave in any way he wants.

I did some research on the internet, and it seems that the best way to train any animal, or even people, is to use something called ‘positive reinforcement’. This involves rewarding correct behaviour instead of punishing wrong behaviour.

Using treats like small pieces of meat or dog biscuits, I can get Cookie to sit, stay, lie down and shake hands.
He has stopped pulling on his lead when we go out for walks. This was quite easy, all I had to do was stop every time he started pulling and call him back to me. When he returns to my side, I commend him and stroke his head (his reward). He soon realised that if he wants to keep moving forward, he mustn’t pull, because every time he does, he is made to stop.

My neighbour’s dog, on the other hand, a lovely German Sherpherd, does exactly what she is told when she has her choke collar on, but the moment she is off her lead, she completely ignores her owner’s commands!

These new training methods were developed by dolphin and killer whale trainers in aquatic centers, places like Marineland in Antibes. It is obviously not possible to train a killer whale using punishment, if you did, it would just eat you and swim away. But by offering rewards everytime the animal does something right, trainers can achieve wonderful results. If you’ve ever seen a killer whale performing, you’ll understand what I’m talking about.

If you have a dog, and would like to know more about successful training, I’ve found a very good publication on the subject:

Comment éduquer son chien : les principes de base

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