Hi {{first_name}} ,
Somebody asked me this week about a German Shepherd who reacts hard on the street. Pulls, barks, locks onto every dog he sees. The owner has been telling him to lie down.
That dog is not going to lie down. He is somewhere else entirely, and the command is landing on nobody.
Here is the part nobody wants to hear. Most people with a working dog spend two years trying to shut off the exact thing they paid for.
In This Issue
Why "down, down, down" gets you nowhere with a dog in drive
The movement that makes a dog available again
Why building drive on yourself creates a problem you cannot switch off
What goes wrong three weeks after a board and train ends
Reading time: 4 minutes
Channel the drive. Do not try to squash it.
This is the whole thing with working dogs. A Malinois, a Dutch Shepherd, a working line German Shepherd, a Doberman, any real working dog. That dog came with a motor. Your job is to point it somewhere.
The mistake I see constantly is somebody trying to make a high drive dog into a low drive dog. That project fails, and it fails miserably, and you end up with a frustrated dog and a frustrated owner who both think the other one is the problem.
Part of channeling is picking where you do it. Keep the dog limited to situations he can actually succeed in while you are building this. A dog who rehearses failure every afternoon on the same sidewalk is learning that sidewalk, and what he is learning is that he loses his mind there.
"Down. Down. Down."
Watch what happens when a dog is lit up and the owner starts repeating a command. The dog is jacked up and starts squealing, and the owner says it louder. Nothing about that gets better.
My dogs know sit and down as an off switch. That works because it was built long before the moment it gets used, and because I channel the drive first. The word is the last step, and it only works on a dog who is actually available to hear it.
Movement makes him available.
Before you ask for anything, move. Turn 180 degrees and walk the other way. Come back. Turn 180 and go again.
For most dogs movement gives the brain something to do besides lock on. After a few of those the dog checks back in with you, and now a command means something.
I use the same thing on a dog who forges ahead on leash. Any time he gets his shoulder past my hip, I turn 180 and go back. He figures out where he belongs without me saying a word.
Build drive on an object, never on yourself.
Somebody wrote in about a dog who ignores toys and only chases him. He wanted to know how to tire the dog out.
Do not let that continue. A dog whose whole outlet is chasing you is building drive that comes up toward you, and that is very hard to shut down once it is running. Put it on a flirt pole, a ball, a toy, something the dog can win that is not your body.
If the dog has no interest in toys yet, build that first. A harness and a little teasing gets most dogs there. The goal is a dog who has somewhere to put his energy that does not end with him in your face.
Three weeks after board and train.
This one comes up every time. A dog goes off for three weeks of training, comes back solid, and within a month the owner is asking what went wrong.
They stopped requiring obedience. They got lax with it. The dog did not forget anything, and the structure that held him together is just gone from his day.
With a working line dog, the biting is the easy part.
I have trained, worked and consulted protection dogs as well as sport dogs. The one thing we never had to teach a dog twice was how to bite. That part is already in him.
What takes all the work is teaching him when not to. That is obedience, and it is the piece that holds everything else together. A dog who only knows how to go is a dog nobody can live with.
Your dog has the drive. You are not going to talk him out of it. Give it somewhere to go, then ask.
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1. Free Training Content on My Website
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Until next Tuesday,
- Robert
