Making Deposits
Whether talking about advanced obedience or gundog work, in order to elevate your dog’s working ability you should focus on first building trust with your dog. Think of trust like you would a bank account. You should be depositing more than you are withdrawing to stay in the positive. The larger your account is, the more capable and confident your dog will be in your abilities as a trainer/handler. Having a full account also allows more funds that you can draw from if/when you need to challenge your dog’s ability in the field. But on the opposite side of the spectrum, if your account is overdrawn (i.e. your dog has little to no trust in you), you will find your dog struggling once you start raising the difficulty of what you are asking it to do and will have very little left in your account when push comes to shove.
What Is Trust?
Trust is defined as a firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something. We all have heard the saying that trust isn’t given, but instead is earned. Though this is an overused cliché, it is clearly evident that trust must indeed be earned when you are working with dogs. It is also important to note that trust is not an absolute mindstate. It is instead ephemeral in nature. It can be built upon or become degraded by the ways in which we conduct ourselves and by how our dogs view the way we conduct ourselves when interacting with them.
The First Step To Building Trust: Be Fair
In order to gain our dog’s trust we must make it a point to always be fair to the dog. When something goes wrong in training, we should always take a moment to reflect on what caused the breakdown in communication. More often than not, you will find it winds up being a handler issue. Therefore, we should focus on only giving corrections if the failure is truly on the dog’s part and not on our own.
It is unfair to correct a dog that has not either A) been taught the proper way to act in “X” situation or B) was not at fault for the error that occurred. Correcting your dog before properly identifying the underlying cause of a training blunder will withdraw from your bank account that you have been painstakingly making deposits into (no bueno).
Being understanding also ties in with the idea of being fair. We can be fair to our dogs by giving grace to them when they succumb to temptations that are above their current standard of training. It would be absurd to expect a 12 week old pupper, still undergoing free shaping, to not chase a cat if it were to walk by with all the sass in the world.
The Second Step? Be Consistent!
You will hear the best of the best stress the importance of consistency in training. It could be something as simple as being consistent in not ever letting your dog up on the furniture or the way you give a hand cast on a blind. Consistency can be demonstrated and communicated through our body language, mood, and tone (this also includes how you blow your whistle for recall, sit, etc.).
Care should also be taken in being consistent with setting your dog up for success. For example, when teaching blinds it is vital to first build trust through establishing consistency in the dog finding a bird/bumper in the same location over and over again via memories. So when you finally transition to blinds and send your dog out on its first actual blind, it already expects to find something lying next to that half dead bush in the middle of the training field, because it has found birds there dozens of times in the past.
Recap
If you are reading this article, there is probably a good chance that you find value in a dog that can operate at a high standard in varying situations of increasing difficulty. You may be involved in competitions or just want to be able to take your dog to the park and know that they will behave better than your toddler, who’s currently throwing sand encased cat turds at the boy on the swing. Either way, it is inconceivable to expect to have a dog at such a level without first building trust within your working relationship. Being fair and remaining consistent with your dog will go a long way towards establishing trust and further develop the foundation needed in order to push your dog on to greater achievements.
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