The most important and useful part of training is getting your training to be functional and reliable in real life. We have found people struggle to get their dog to behave as well in every day life as they do in a formal training session. After some thought and discussion, we think it is because of the following reasons.
Engagement!!
The biggest area where we see the most holes in training is due to a lack of engagement. Engagement is exactly what it sounds like: your dog choosing to pay attention to you over everything else that is going on. Without engagement your training will likely not hold up in real life when your dog is too distracted, excited, etc. The trickiest part of engagement is making it rewarding to your dog to pay attention to you rather than the really cool distractions going on around them. So that generally means rewarding your dog with food when they decide to look at you. Some dogs are naturally more engaged with their owners than others, which makes building strong engagement easier. But you really have to work at it with other dogs and generalize it in many different environments around a lot of distractions. It is important to set up your training sessions appropriately, where they are in fact learning it is more rewarding to engage with you and pointless to fixate on life's distractions, otherwise you are just practicing the opposite that distractions are interesting and they should engage with them and ignore you.
Relaxation Around Distractions
One of the most important skills that you can teach your dog is how to relax around distractions. This will make for a much more enjoyable experience if you decide to have people over to your house, go to someone else's house, or out to a patio or brewery. Ideally, our dogs should be able to see a distraction, no matter what it is, and take it in stride. The key to gain true relaxation, though, is to not rely too heavily on food. If our dog is constantly expecting a treat for laying down, they are never truly relaxing. They are always in that working mindset and can actually make it harder for them to relax.
Transitioning from Primary Reinforcers to Premack
A primary reinforcer is something we use (like a treat, toy, freedom) to reward a behavior. But the key to reliable behaviors, especially around distractions is making the behavior rewarding on its own. This is called the Premack Principle. We don't always have rewards on us, especially if we take our dogs out and about or we have guest that arrive unexpectedly. So it is valuable to have the dog find the behavior itself rewarding- that way our dogs are more likely to do the thing because they find the thing rewarding, not an actual treat.
But the key to this is to not rely too much on the treat when we are training a behavior. Using the treat is great when we are first introducing a new behavior to our dog, especially as a lure to get them in the right position. But once our dog is reliably following the lure, we need to make sure to start fading out of the lure. If we don't and we keep using the treat as a lure or whip the treat out if they don't listen initially, it turns into a bribe for our dog. They won't do the behavior without the treat right in front of their nose. They think that the need the treat to do the behvaior. Instead, we want to teach our dogs that it is their behavior that gets them the reward (such as if they sit and wait at the door, they can be released outside to play). Not the other way around.
Too Much Nagging
A lot of dogs struggle when you first start fading out of food. This is completely normal but we also want them to learn that even though I don't have food in my hand, they still have to do the behavior. This is where follow through comes into play. There are a million different ways to follow through with expectations but the most important thing is that follow through must increase the reliability of the behavior. At this stage (they have a good understanding of the skill), if you have to help the dog to do a behavior, you should not use a reward. I may reward my dog for a really good rep here or there, but the whole point of this is to fade out of the food. We are teaching our dogs that just because food isn't involved doesn't mean all expectations go out of the window.
Another way to gain more reliablity in everyday life is to stop nagging your dog so much. A lot of people are constantly telling your dog what to do. For example, a lot of people will keep repeating place when their dog is on place. We also see a lot of people who will repeat the commands many times when the dog isn't listening, this just teaches them they do not need to listen to what you say. Instead, what we should be doing is telling our dogs to do what we want them to do once and then following through with a consesquesnce if they don't do it. What kind of consequence you use is going to depend on your dog and the situation, but it can range from simply putting your dog back on place, using body or leash pressure, or a tool like a high quality e-collar.
If we do not have the time to dedicate to training our dog in certain situations, like when we have people over, it is not a bad idea to utilize management to prevent your dog from practicing unwanted behaviors. Just be aware, if you are only utilizing management tools like a crate, you are not teaching your dog how to relax in those situations. But management is still a good tool to use in certain moments. We don't want to allow our dogs to keep practicing unwanted behaviors because it just makes them that much more difficult to train out.
Fading Out of Tools (E-collar, Prong Collar, Leash)
Another crucial step to getting our dogs to make good life choices on their own is to fade out of any tools that you may use with your dog. We hear all the time that someone's dog is great when their ecollar or prong collar are on but are a completely different dog when those tools are off. If we are doing it correctly, we shouldn't have to use tools consistenly for the rest of our dogs life. The goal should be to eventually fade out of those things- because in every day life our dogs don't always have those tools on. To do that you have to again stop nagging so much. So that means, for a behavior I am confident my dog knows, I will move away from using low level e-collar stim (nagging) to a more corrective level, something that increases the reliability of them listening to my verbal cue vs waiting for the reminder or consequence from the e-collar. Again, what that level is depends on the individual dog. The same concept applies to both a prong collar and a leash.
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