Our dog owners all want the same thing that they have grown accustomed to seeing from every other dog trainer’s page. They want to see their dog happy during training.
We always love seeing our trainees happy during training too but a hard reality is that your dog is not always happy during training. And a dog trainer who tries to convince you that they are is a dog trainer we wouldn’t trust, they are not teaching your dog anything of value, or don’t share that some dogs can get depressed too.
We like to ask dog owners who ask us this question, are you always happy when you are learning at the university, a career workshop, a job seminar, a math class, or during a military bootcamp?
Dogs experience similar issues that people go through. We can feel exhausted after the job seminar but keep going because we need our job, feel confused about the math lecture but keep going because we need to pass, feel overwhelmed about taking on a new department in a new state but we keep going because we got promoted. Dogs experience all of these same emotions and sometimes they don’t want to train, sometimes they don’t want to learn a new command they only want to play with the ball, sometimes they don’t want to learn how to walk because they walked a lot the previous day. Sometimes they don’t want to leave the kennel because they know they are going to experience learning.
If you looked back at your own personal experiences, you felt a greater sense of accomplishment when you overcame a very hard challenge you were struggling with that propelled you forward at your job, you completed 20 of the same math assignments to pass that semester, or you contributed something of value in your group seminar that the others finally accepted you for. You gained confidence by working through the hard parts and felt joy now that you could do something you didn’t know how to do before. We see the same emotions in the dogs we train.
So it is ok that your dog is not always happy while they are learning. A dog trainer who promotes something different is not showing you everything they do behind close doors or they are not teaching them anything of value. That’s also why you have been paying for years of lessons and getting little results back in actual world application. Your dog was always worked in great conditions when they wanted to work. Not conditions that pushed your dog to be more.
Your dog can do more than you believe. Stop holding your dog back. Train your dogs up. We are here to help when you are ready.
Thank you for your articles. They are very helpful to me. Can you help me with something?
Your articles are very helpful
So well said, but a little PC. How come?
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Several of them are rife with spelling problems and
I in finding it very troublesome to tell the truth nevertheless I’ll surely come back
again.
We really appreciate you keeping up with are blog posts. We know we have some writing errors we don’t catch. We are a very small team and we try and get out helpful information in short bursts between everything else we do for the main business. We do appreciate you!