Post by Aussienot on May 3, 2007 17:29:08 GMT -5
This is my training book of the year. A brave call in May, but I'm making it.
The subtitle of this book is 'The Education of an Unlikely Champion.' It's a training book based around the process of training her high drive, completely crazy Border Collie to have control and focus, without using a correction.
She explains exactly how she trained the behaviors, using shaping and targeting. The training games, particularly the puppy games for foundation training are fantastic, and are definitely going into my training tool box for the next puppy I train.
What is brilliant about this book is that she shares her failures as well as her successes. Training Buzz was like pushing water uphill. She talks about training tactics that seemed like a good idea at the time, but in hindsight caused problems later. She calls her decision to raise Buzz with only positive reinforcement an experiment she would not repeat. "I realized that if it were possible to raise a dog without even negative punishment, I was not yet the trainer who could do it." This from arguably one of the top agility trainers in the world.
I particularly liked when she wrote that the frustration she felt was not frustration with her dog. "Buzz himself was never boring to train. I know now that the frustration I felt was due to my lack of knowledge on how to focus Buzz's drive."
I highly recommend this book if you want to know anything about how to create a dog that is obsessed with training, if you want to know more about positive training, or if you just want to read a good dog story.
The subtitle of this book is 'The Education of an Unlikely Champion.' It's a training book based around the process of training her high drive, completely crazy Border Collie to have control and focus, without using a correction.
She explains exactly how she trained the behaviors, using shaping and targeting. The training games, particularly the puppy games for foundation training are fantastic, and are definitely going into my training tool box for the next puppy I train.
What is brilliant about this book is that she shares her failures as well as her successes. Training Buzz was like pushing water uphill. She talks about training tactics that seemed like a good idea at the time, but in hindsight caused problems later. She calls her decision to raise Buzz with only positive reinforcement an experiment she would not repeat. "I realized that if it were possible to raise a dog without even negative punishment, I was not yet the trainer who could do it." This from arguably one of the top agility trainers in the world.
I particularly liked when she wrote that the frustration she felt was not frustration with her dog. "Buzz himself was never boring to train. I know now that the frustration I felt was due to my lack of knowledge on how to focus Buzz's drive."
I highly recommend this book if you want to know anything about how to create a dog that is obsessed with training, if you want to know more about positive training, or if you just want to read a good dog story.