No wonder Schutzhund people have a bad reputation - Page 11

Jeff and jen, this ones for you!
 Sorry to add fuel to the fire, but i have to tell a story.
I live pretty close to jenni and couple of months ago, My fiance and myself took a ride out to meet jenni and her dogs.Im getting my first working line very soon and she was nice enough to allow us to come out and view her dogs and offer up some much needed education. Well, when we arrived, jen was on her driveway with her dogs and before we got out of the truck my fiance gave me that look that all men know and says " Oh, so this is the dog breeder youve been talking to" LOL. Thankfully my "bitch" isnt to jealous and territorial and after she got ahold of jennis son, everything else went out the window..haha. Ok, now we must stop this madness before jens head explodes..lol

Jeff,

It is all BS without videos....so I want to see you train those monkeys.

Additionally, have you ever noticed how these lions and tigers always end up killing their trainers? Just sayin'.

LOL! That made me smile! 

Jen, Over the years I've trained quite a few working GSD. I once managed a large GSD breeding/training kennel in the South. We supplied various police departments with dogs, and also the Tyson family with pp dogs.  I've owned several, and appreciate the breed for what they are.  Yours, by the way, in your avatar, takes my breath away everytime I look at him, BEAUTIFUL.

Yes, pit bulls have been bred to work VERY closely with man, in a very aroused state, and any tendency to turn on their owner or handler was culled out of the bloodline.  They ARE soft as hell toward their handlers, something I appreciate. You just can't have a dog bred to bring a 1800 pound bull to its knees flying off the handle and attacking people.  YOu can see how bad it is, now that the breed has been a "fad" breed for almost 30 years, with emphasis on idiots breeding for "guard work".  Sigh.

I just want to point out that where "positive training" is so consistantly misunderstood is that NO NORMAL RED BLOODED DOG would chose a piece of hot dog over chasing a squirrel or getting in a dog fight! Of course not.  It's the TRAINING (or better put, the shaping of behavior) that happens before that moment that controls the dog.

If that control is not shaped into the dog's behavior, then, no, of course it won't work.  But lots and lots of people are doing it.  And all I'm saying is THOSE are the people I admire.  I think it would be a bit lame to say none of them (us) have dogs with high drives.   

Just curious, what do motivational trainers do to motivate dogs who aren't interested in food? And who seem irritated with clickers? I'm not trying to fuel the flames here, but my Beckett has fair to middling drives. He, as a pup, would look at me like I was nuts when I started out trying the clicker method...kept shaking his head like his ears were hurting, & finally grabbed the thing & had it chomped up before I could get it away from him...it wouldn't go clicky anymore....so I moved on to treats. He wouldn't even eat the hotdogs bits we used for tracking scent, not when offered as treats. What motivated him, & still motivates him, are moving things, like rags, balls, dumbbells, sleeves, sneaky people, idiots. LOL, seriously, he takes your measure, & you better measure up, 'cause if you don't, he starts giving me the look, waiting see if he's gonna get the 'go ahead'....come to think of it, my bitch Kali is like that, too. The difference is that Beckett uses the quiet approach, he will stand silent until he's given the 'OK', Kali will start warning the bad person with barking, while she's waiting for the 'OK'. Both totally serious, both pretty effective deterents. So how do you motivate a pup that can think for itsself? And that is smarter than average? This is Beckett's "Are you kidding me?" face.  jackie harris

I answered that question earlier in the thread. I am working with a motivational trainer, as I have a pup that is very soft, and this is a new experience for me, having only had GSDs before.

She recommends getting a dog really, really turned on to a toy or tug, by playing with it yourself, and pretending it is something very special, but you don't let the dog have it. I've watched Leerburg's video on building focus and drive, and the method described is similar to what he uses in the video. (I forget the name of the well-known Schutzhund trainer who is featured in that video.)

She allows leash corrections, but you don't HAVE to use them if y ou don't want to. I was certainly wishing the couple with this friggin' cocker spaniel would learn how to do an effective correction. Their dog would be a foot and a half away from them, and sniffing my dog's butt before they reacted! 

She got into motivational and clicker training when she found traditional method didn't work with very soft dogs. She started out with Kohler.

What works with my dog: building her ability to focus on me at home. In the class where her attention is everywhere but on me, because she's so nervous and excited, I use praise. LOTS of praise, because she's too stressed to be interested in treats. Once she decides nothing bad is going to happen to her, she settles down, and will take treats from me but not anyone else. By the end of the 6 week course, she would also accept treats from the trainer and her helper.

Now, Jeff would tell me to have this dog PTS. I think a really skilled trainer knows how to work with ALL types of dogs. And this trainer DOES. She rehabilitates dogs with aggression issues that otherwise would be PTS. Within a few weeks, they are taking part in the obedience classes.

 jackie, it is not about treats only. What you load and pair the clicker with is up to the individual dog.
The reward that he gets after executing a desired behavior can be anything the animal cares about. 
Toys, treats and heck if your dog thrives on praise, so be it.
The clicker is only a marker. Not a command, not a reward. Just a marker to mark one short point in time.
 As far as an animal being annoyed by the clicker, I suppose there are some. But one, I think it is rare enough. And two, if I see annoyance in a dog with the clicker, if I look closer, it is usually because the handler is confusing to the dog. As all training methods, it has to make sense to both parties in order to have any success!

 Diane, no one is saying that you always have to resort to physical corrections, but my point is that with certain dogs (and I'm not saying necessarily high drive dogs- that's not the issue-it's a certain type temperament that probably occurs once in every thousand, but they're out there) there is NO other way to get through to them or save something/someone else in their path. My Pit Bulls would probably get into a car with Charles Manson...well one might the other probably wouldn't, only because he's a momma's boy. But anyway...my GSDs....hell no. Different temperaments entirely. My Pits would take a correction from a stranger. My GSDs would probably bite a stranger who corrected them.

They're just different temperamentally, which is what we're trying to say. Sure, you can train them and train them and train them, and they can have near perfect OB, and as long as you catch them in the same split second when they are contemplating coming at you or someone else, you can stop it....but if you are even a split second off and they go from thinking about it to planning on doing it, in their minds, they're halfway there and you are really powerless to control them mentally at that point. 

Yes, it's a handler mistake by then, but so what; what do you do? Ignore it and allow them to continue on that path? Or intervene physically in the interest of preventing tragedy? No brainer, to me. 

Another thing you're not taking into account is the number of top GSDs that are purchased as adults (since the thread title involves SchH. people and their bad reputation); adults who have been trained a certain way, have extremely confident, sure temperaments who fully believe that they are the leader and who have zero respect for the guy who just got them off the plane. Do you allow them to kill anything in their path or attack you for every miscommunication while you retrain them w/food and try to bond with them? Sure, you develop a working relationship, but that can take a looong time with some of these dogs, depending on their individual temperament. 

I know I'm drifting off on tangents, but I'm just trying to point out that  there are many variables and to start a thread accusing a certain group of people of being abusive when you obviously know nothing of what they're up against at times is really ignorant. Sometimes a serious, physical correction is the only thing that will get through to a dog in a split second, and when dealing with certain dogs, a split second is all you get. 

BTW, the dog in my avatar is my bitch, V Capri vom Hagenberg SchH1, KKL1. She says she'll take "breathtaking" but resents "he" with every fiber of her being. 

I wasted a whole year of my bitch's life because of a TD who insisted that if my bitch didn't control herself in the OB parts of the SchH protection routine, her only correction should be dead prey. He would just let the sleeve fall limply to the ground on the theory that she would sigh sadly and walk away, yearning to be a good girl and get live prey. When she didn't come around, he kept insisting that she would eventually. I argued, but he insisted that if we did it his way, she would last longer in competition and not burn out like all those compulsion-trained dogs. Well, I never did do a lot of compulsion; I preferred motivation with corrections for when she flipped me off. (She isn't "clear" what I want? BS! She is perfectly clear! She just doesn't give a rat's butt what I want!) Well, after a year of that baloney, I still had a big nasty bitch with the devil in her eye, sneering at us as she ripped away at the dead prey, and still no further ahead in her training, just pretty sure that if she effed up, we'd drop the sleeve on the ground dead and she could maul it. What a giant waste of time and "training." A TD with a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Still, he had more experience than I did, so I bought in. What I wasn't paying attention to was the fact that all he had experience with was his own nervebag weenies. Not the same thing at all. People need to stop and think twice, because what works for one temperament don't work for squat for another.

A ball.
A tug.
A stick.
A Kong.
Roughhousing.
Verbal praise.
Fetch.
A bite on the helper.

Every dog likes *something*.

"Does Wayne Brady gotta choke a Bitch?"