The Messy Middle - Keep Going

The messy middle training recall with Indie!

There is always that stage during the training of our obedience commands that things look pretty awkward as the dog is figuring out how to preform the commands as I show her over and over… the messy middle!!!

In this video, I’m showing one such moment from about a week ago when Indie and I we’re working on her recalls around distractions (former triggers-dogs) for the first time. I’ve left the voice over out so that you can hear my verbal feedback to Indie as I give her the initial ecollar guidance and then also add in some leash or signal cues if she needs extra help to connect the dots. These are the moments when dogs are very often wrongly labeled as ‘stubborn’ or ‘unwilling’ or ‘difficult’ when in fact it’s a very normal and necessary learning process which requires patients, the right motivation and lots and lots of repetitions! So we’ll done, sweetie pie Indie!!!

In this video, Remington has been gaining confidence though our obedience exercises and confidence building exercises! Remy is developing an understanding of the recall and our other commands but how can we tell if a dog truly understands the meaning of a command/or a stage in training in any context or if he’s just repeating a specific pattern that we’ve repeated over and over? In the video you’ll see Remington doing some excellent and confident recalls across the length of the dog yard. Then when I move the cots and start to repeat the exercise across the width of the yard, he gets confused and lost! At that point you’ll see me jump in to give him extra help by adding some long line guidance, using my body and voice along with the remote collar to ‘paint him a picture’ about how to recall in this new direction! This is such a great example of how dogs often don’t generalize very well and why we have to work in as many different contexts, situations and environments as possible to proof the commands and the dog’s training and to gauge the depth of his comprehension!