Good morning. Well, if I’m being honest…not such a great morning. At least it did not start off well. If you follow me on IG @justdogswithsherri you may have already seen why my morning has not been so great as of yet. I’m hoping that things will change shortly and that I’m not in for the whole “bad things happen in 3s” thing.
Before 7:00 am I dropped an almost full bottle of salad dressing on the tile floor in my kitchen. If you’re going to do it, do it right, right? Well, it smashed from one end of the kitchen to the other and I have a long kitchen. :( It all happened so fast, as it always does when something drops out of your hand. My reflexes were slow this morning; perhaps on another day I would have caught it and saved…my morning. But not today. It hit the tile and literally exploded; sending dressing and glass across the kitchen. It broke with such force that it shot a piece of glass into my shin.
I stood frozen…
Looking around the kitchen I wasn’t quite sure where to start. Thankfully my hubby came down and gave me a hand to get started. He got both Elsa and Riggs outside immediately, which was the biggest concern. Next he picked up the runners we have down for Miss Elsa and gave them a shake. Then the rest was up to me. Glass is one thing but glass and dressing mixed together?
So this incident left me thinking about training. I had to let our dogs inside because of yard workers and keep them out of the kitchen. Thank goodness I have a nice solid “out.” My guys have free reign in the kitchen unless I say “out.” This is training at it’s finest. Prep work done and now usable.
I run into a lot of people who don’t want to train their dog. They don’t want to be mean and tell their dog what to do. Well, if you have no way to communicate with your dog, what do you have? You have physical maneuvering. If you can’t say “out, wait, place or down/stay” how do you get your dog to do anything, other than pushing and pulling them around?
I believe that we should train our dogs; teach them the prep work that will likely be needed down the road. Today was one of those days and Riggs being Riggs, who must be close to me at all times, did not want to be out of the kitchen. But because he has been trained to “out,” I was able to use it. Of course he stayed as close as was allowed; just outside the kitchen. If I had not trained my dogs; I could have locked them away in a room, but I didn’t have to.
There are a handful of behaviors that I think all dogs should understand fully. Understand fully means a lot of training and proofing of a behavior. All the other behaviors that may be less useful are just great to teach our dogs. Why not teach your dog everything that you can? The more you teach them the more they can learn and the more you have to use.
Training…positive training to be precise, is a wonderful thing. Giving your dog an education is important and as far as I’m concerned, essential.
Implement it into your day to day.
This is something I stress about training. You know the saying “use it or lose it?” Well, that includes training your dog. If you train your dog in a 10 min. session everyday but never implement it into your day to day, your going to lose it. Some behaviors should be a way of life.
I am often asked about my “no collar” zone (my house). There are a couple of reasons I don’t use collars in the house. #1 is safety, dogs can get snagged up on something or each other by their collar. #2 is collar reliance; which is something I have written and talked about often. Collar grabs can be a bad habit of a means to control our dogs. Training is the answer.
When you teach your dog a useful behavior like “out, wait, boundaries” etc., use them. Implement them into your day to day to make sure that they are there when you need them.
Now I’m back to more floor cleaning…