Book Review: Beyond Basic Dog Training  (Howell Book House,1992)

   This book is written for both the novice and the experienced dog trainer, and is an excellent addition to any dog owner's book shelf. Diane L. Bauman advocates clarity, fairness, and motivation in training, and not only does she discuss how to include these principles in your training program, she also points out confusing and ineffective practices. Rather than having a pattern trained dog who performs an exercise after having a sequence of commands repeated over and over (producing a non-thinking response done from habit), Bauman believes in producing a thinking dog, who has been encouraged to reason and solve simple problems.

   I believe that it is the reliance on pattern training that has resulted in comments such as "My Anatolian doesn't like to do obedience work (he's too smart)," "He just lags too much and doesn't pay attention (I think he's bored)," and "She doesn't want to do things over and over." Bauman offers insights on how to turn your dog from a passive trainee to an active partner in the training process. For example, she states that "letting a dog work out his problems is much more advantageous than doing all the work for him or repeating commands. Dogs get a great deal of satisfaction when they have figured something out. When the trainer is simply repeating a command over and over again, dogs tend to get bored or frightened and tune out or give up."

   One of the major concepts in this book is that a dog who is wrong is not 'bad', he is just wrong - "trainers who teach dogs to think believe that dogs learn by trial and error, and that when a dog is wrong, that is wonderful because when he exhausts all of the wrong possibilities he will then be right." This does not mean that dogs are never to be corrected, but that the timing and the reason behind the correction should be appropriate. A dog may not respond correctly to a command for any one of four reasons: the dog may be confused, he may be afraid, he may be distracted, or he may feel that he has a choice of responding or not. In the first two cases the dog is merely wrong, and has not yet figured out what to do - correction would be inappropriate, as it would only confuse or frighten him more. However, if the dog is not paying attention or thinks that he has a choice, some sort of correction would be in order.

   The ideal result of dog training should be to produce the "Thinking Dog", who is "a confident, happy working animal who understands fully what he is expected to do on any given command, enjoys meeting new challenges, is rarely bored with obedience... he has been guided and trained in such a way that he is not afraid to be wrong." An obedience trained dog is not just a 'trick animal' but is a companion who can better guard you and family because she will 'stay' off to the side if someone visits, or 'heel' nicely with you when you go to the store; she will always be with you (instead of shut up somewhere) because she has good manners and can behave reliably.