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By Melissa French

I very much enjoy my job. My most favorite part is helping someone with their furry friend and to help integrate them into their household. My hope is to do my very best to see that their four-legged friend remains a cherished member of their family.

When someone makes that first step in the decision to train their dog by talking to me, I get this question, “What kind of trainer are you?” My answer? The type of trainer will help you get results. Sometimes that is not the answer they want to hear... mostly because they don’t know how to decipher it.

The phone rang one day and I had a very nice lady asking me for help. She had exhausted the tools of an area trainer and was looking for results that she had not seen thus far. Upon entering her home, her dog greeted me happily. Not with a wagging, nice-to-meet-you tail, but with a guarding bark and a wagging tail. This told me that she very much enjoyed her job as the Guardian of the Home!

The lady’s short-term training goal was to be able to have strangers come into her home without the worry of the dog nipping and or jumping up. Her long-term training goal was to have anyone come into her house without any worries at all. She wanted to be able to control her dog, period.

We discussed things she had tried including tossing chains on the floor, or squirting water to try to distract the dog until she could redirect her to proper behavior. This works very well in certain dogs. But, for whatever reason, this did not seem to work with her dog. Her dog would ignore any of the distractions after the first day of use. This told me that her dog was not sensitive and needed follow through. Distractions serve well unless a dog sees the distraction as an enticer. If enticed a dog will become “charged” or “pumped”. Depending on the temperament of the dog this could be a great prelude to “attack” and in this case, “attack” as in play. Sometimes distractions serve as a “bluffer” and really smart alpha-type dogs can need a follow through in order to understand leader roles. Her dog seemed to mostly fall into these two categories.

The first thing that I did was to let her know that I would have told her to do the exact things that the trainer before me told her to do. The difference being that if those didn’t work, we would go on to something else. When dealing with dogs, it is important to have an entire toolbox. I would not use one certain training method on every dog. I want to use the correct training method for, not only the dog, but for the person. If one type of training method does not work for one person and their dog, I don’t give up. I will find something that will work. This is why I find out not only the short-term training goals of a client, but long-term training goals as well.

Don’t get me wrong, there are standard answers to lots questions, such as, “What should I do about my digging dog?” My answer? “Give them a place to dig.” My answers are standard for dogs I do not know. Once I meet the person, the dog, and I know the circumstances behind the digging, (such as there are moles in the yard and the dog is a Jack Russell Terrier), I might have a different answer, such as, “Hire an exterminator.” The fact is there are several different answers to that question and I could go into all of them that I know. But why when it is easier to find out the real problem and directly get to the results?

So many dog trainers these days have standard answers only. Once at a dog training conference I asked a lady who trains dogs for a living what she would do if her methods did not work on a dog. Would she consider using another type of training method? Her answer was, “NO!” She stated to me, “Well, sometimes you lose dogs.” I never knew exactly what that meant.

I have encouraged anything from clicker training to the use of a remote shock collar. But I ALWAYS choose the least forceful method that I can think of for a person’s short-term training goals that will fit the temperament of the dog. The most important part of dog training is to do no harm. But I think that the second most important part of dog training is to get results in a timely fashion. Since “timely” is a subjective term, I ask the person whose dog we are training to give me the definition.

I received a phone call from a lady that basically said that we had one training session to get her dog’s leash pulling under control or the dog was going to the shelter. That statement made me pass by a lot of tools in my toolbox. I had a limited amount of time to reach a goal. And guess what, she didn’t take the dog to the shelter.

Sometimes, there is no right answer. I had a guy tell me that he moved in with his girl friend and her dog was hiking his leg on all of the boxes in the apartment. He wanted the behavior fixed in one afternoon. When I told him to get a crate and explained how to use it, he wouldn’t hear of it, because his girlfriend would throw a fit if he put her dog in a crate. It was an intact male poodle 3 years old. I explained that he needed to neuter the dog as soon as possible. That wasn’t an option either. I told him to leash the dog and not let the dog out of his sight. He thought he could do that. That fixed his short-term training goal. What about the long-term goals, you ask? He never called back.

When wishing to label someone in their profession, be careful. Jumping to conclusions without first hand research is like diving into a pond without knowing how deep it is. While I am not much on the word “NEVER”, I can safely say that is never the safe thing to do.