Victoria Stilwell Nitpicks: Dog Training Commands

Matt
Saturday, February 14th 2009 9:45am

I love Victoria Stillwell, and compared to Cesar Millan she's awesome. Even if you love Cesar Millan, which many of my readers do, you can see that nobody's going to learn to accidentally hurt their dog from Victoria. However, there are a couple of minor things she doesn't do that I think are important.

First, instead of praising a dog with "good sit" or "good wait", she often praises with a generic "good dog". She's missing out on a chance to further reinforce the command.

Second, she will repeat the command instead of repeating the praise. So out of one side of her mouth she says don't repeat commands and then you see her saying, "wait… wait… wait…". Repetition is necessary to help a dog add duration to a command. But repeating the praise, "good wait", let's the dog know he's still doing the right thing and should continue until you release. You're just repeating the praise, reassuring the dog he's doing good. You're not repeating the command which will confuse a dog, possibly making him think he's somehow not doing he right thing right now.

Third, she doesn't put the dog's name before the command. It's better to always give a command like, "Kody sit", "Kody wait", or "Kody down". It has the benefit of the dog knowing who you're talking to if there are multiple dogs or if you ever decide to adopt another dog.

Fourth, she doesn't use an official release. Especially for commands with duration like wait, your dog needs to know when it's ok to stop. This is why you use a release, which is generally, "okay".

So a good example of a full cycle of communication for an extended sit and wait might be "Kody sit… good sit… Kody wait… good wait… good wait… good wait… okay!"

0 Comments
RSS feed for comments on this post
Submit a Comment