Hello and welcome to the new Training and Enrichment Corner blog! You may know me (Sarah) as our Practice Manager, but I’m also a dog trainer who specializes in games and relationship-building positive reinforcement training methods.
So… what’s the point? Most of us know when we get a dog that it’s a good idea to take them to a dog training class. But why do we do it? I love asking this question in class because a lot of the answers start out like “so my dog will behave” or “my dog will listen to me.” But I’ve found it’s rarely the real answer. I’ve never had a client actually want their dog to do everything they say all of the time – if they did, they’d just get a robot. After all, robots are so much more reliable! So then what is dog training really for?
I believe dog training serves two primary functions. One function is to teach the dog how to live in our human-centric world. Dogs aren’t born knowing everything we do or don’t want them to do. Sure, they have their doggie instincts, but humans find a lot of those absolutely disgusting (*ahem* who doesn’t back away from the VERY happy but VERY smelly dog that just rolled in something dead?). Further, dogs don’t inherently know how to process all of our weird things – umbrellas are scary, cars come out of nowhere, leashes are restrictive – I could go on and on and on. It’s our job to teach them how to navigate our world, literally and figuratively.
The second function I believe dog training serves is enrichment. Just like us, dogs get bored if they don’t have something to do. They need physical and mental exercise. Dog training can help meet those needs. Dog training requires the dog to learn something, so it’s inherently mentally stimulating. A lot of dog training also requires the dog to move in some way or another, incorporating at least more physical exercise than snoozing on the couch with you. Granted, unless you’re doing something like agility or fitness training, training alone may not be enough physical exercise. Yet a lot of dogs go home from class completely exhausted – why is that?!? It’s because learning is more stimulating than just moving, making dog training a great enrichment activity. Plus, enrichment helps alleviate a lot of problematic behaviors that stem from boredom. It’s not a magic bullet – it can’t fix every behavioral problem, but alleviating boredom is often a good starting point (along with ruling out any medical issues or pain).
That’s all for now! Next time we’ll dig into “how” we train and why it matters. Let us know in the comments if you’ve got a training or enrichment question you’d like to see answered in a future post!
What do you think? Why do you train?