Jo's Old Site

Mum had just told me that her Irish Terrier named Ruebens only stands if she gives the signal with the voice command and when she gives the voice command only he reacts as though he doesn’t know what it means. So now she is training him to stand with a voice command as she has read that one cancels out the other. Also with the assistant dog training that I’m doing with Ilse my mini schnauzer we found that she didn’t really know the object as this was because she was going to the object she thought that I wanted by my signal. And the trainer that is helping me with this form of training suggested dropping the hand signal and getting her to go to the article I want with my voice. I also thought later on that as well as dropping the hand signal that I also should drop the fetch command too, and it has worked but when we are teaching dogs to pick up objects in the beginning we should say fetch shoe or whatever. Then after they get consistent with it we can drop fetch and just identify the object and we also should put the objects far apart to begin with as this helps dogs to discriminate between objects. This is of course done after a dog and trainer has been practising with the objects one at the time as that is the first step and it also helps if the dog knows what fetch means.