No Nonsense Dog Training: A Complete Guide to Fully Train Any Dog

By Haz Othman

This is not just another book about dog training. This is a complete manual that encompasses how dogs learn, think and communicate to how to completely train your dog in as little as six weeks from beginning to end. Common behavior problems along with effective remedies are also addressed. No frills, no fluff and no nonsense! Just real training methodology that actually works in the real world on real dogs. From working K9 to the family pet, Haz takes the reader through the training step by step and makes the process easy to understand and implement.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jan 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9781447883630

Book preview

About the Author

Hazhaar Othman is a professional dog trainer, the founder and current Director of Shield K9 inc. His company provides industry leading behavior modification training across multiple locations in Canada and worldwide through their many online courses.  Haz also breeds, imports, trains and sells working canines for the purposes of law enforcement, security, family protection and sport competition.  Haz first fell in love with dogs while working as a dog handler for a private security firm. From then on, his passion for all things canine drove him into the world of dog training. From behavior modification, obedience, working canine, dog sport and more. Haz is a multi dimensional trainer with a direct, proven and effective approach to dog training. His mantra and company motto is real training, real results!

Introduction

In order to get somewhere, you must first decide on a destination. This applies to any discipline, journey or endeavour, and especially dog training. The goal of my training system is to create a dog that is obedient anywhere and stable in his or her behavior regardless of circumstance or environment. My Functional Obedience training system also addresses behavioral issues and common problems that many dog owners face.

This book covers everything from the scientific theory behind what we do to the actual practice and correct use of training tools like the prong collar. I will not water anything down or waste your time with things that sound great but are useless. If you are looking for fluff and unicorn stories, put this book back on the shelf and pick up something by a dolphin trainer or some TV actor pretending to be a dog trainer.  If you want to learn how to get results with your dog or any dog, keep reading and we will make it happen.

Our Functional Obedience Training System is easy to communicate, grounded in the actual science of behavior and is, most importantly, replicable. Our motto is REAL TRAINING, REAL RESULTS and that mantra has led us to thousands of happy customers and thousands of well-trained dogs. This book is a bible on how to create reliable, dependable and, most importantly, functional results.

Good news! You don’t just have to take my word for it. I have hundreds of videos on the internet showing our training with dogs. In fact, this book directly complements my YouTube channel, where I talk about and show examples of many of the topics covered. Watching the videos are not mandatory. Every subject and command covered is discussed in-depth in a step-by-step manner in this book.

What is your goal?

As I mentioned earlier, identifying your goals is important. Goals in training can be varied and your goals will influence the methods used. For example, if your goal is competition obedience or trick training, the method you use will vastly differ from the methods used to create functional obedience. The system I am sharing in this book is for creating functional obedience. Competition obedience is something I love doing but that is a whole other book. The primary focus of this manual is for the companion or service canine. Whether you have a pet, a service dog, or a police canine, your goals are the same when it comes to obedience: reliable functional behaviors that work in the real world and that make your life or work with the dog easy, safe, and enjoyable.

Chapter 1

How Do Dogs Learn?

Before you train the dog, you must understand how he or she learns. The simplest way to say it is that dogs learn through a system of consequences that either reward or punish their behavior.  Basically, as your dog’s trainer, you must make it good to be good and bad to be bad.

Behavioral science has a number of frameworks that accurately describe part of the process. There is also more to how dogs learn and why they do what they do that is not completely covered within said frameworks. However, we will dive into that after this section. I will try to keep the scientific lingo to a minimum but some of it is unavoidable if you want a true understanding of how this all works.

WARNING SCIENCY PART STARTS HERE: Two behavioral science theories are essential to describing how a dog learns or unlearns something.

Classical Conditioning 

Classical conditioning is a type of learning that happens unconsciously. When you learn through classical conditioning, an automatic conditioned response is paired with a specific stimulus. This creates a specific behavior.

The best example of this is from the father of classical conditioning: Ivan Pavlov. In an experiment on canine digestion, he found that dogs were salivating not only when their food was presented to them but also when the people who fed them came into the room.

To test his theory that the dogs were salivating because they were associating the people with being fed, he began ringing a bell and then presenting the food so they would associate the sound with food.

The dogs learned to associate the ringing bell with food, causing their mouths to salivate whenever the bell rang. That means even without the presence of food, they would salivate when they heard the bell.

Classical conditioning is a fundamental learning process that increases a dog’s chances of survival and success. Classical conditioning is not just for dogs. Every being, including humans, benefits from this process. Making associations between two unrelated stimuli creates expectations to prepare for an event. For instance, if you were to eat the colorful red berries found on a certain tree and then got very ill, you would then associate red berries on that specific type of tree with an unpleasant feeling and steer clear. Your chances of survival would thus increase.

From a dog-training perspective, we can use this process to expedite the dog’s learning. For example, if you were to make a sound like "chip", then give the dog a piece of food and repeat this sequence often, in a very short time period, we would then have a dog who associated that sound with food. Now we have a way to tell the dog the instant he does something that earns him a piece of food before we even give that food to him.

Now imagine if we took a rattlesnake, put it in a cage so the dog could not get at it, then gave the dog a high-level static shock via an electric collar when he got within three feet of the snake. The dog would quickly associate the sound, smell, and sight of the snake with the uncomfortable event of the high-level static shock and thus avoid the deadly snake.

Trust me, we can go way deeper into the intricacies of how to use classical conditioning to train a dog, but this is enough for now. You need to have a basic understanding of this and some other key concepts.

After reading this, the proverbial light bulb in your head should be flickering. Think about all the associations your dog has made. Are they productive? Are they contributing to desirable or undesirable behavior?

Operant Conditioning

Operant conditioning is a method of learning that occurs through rewards and punishments for behavior. Through operant conditioning, an individual makes an association between a particular behavior and a consequence (Skinner, 1938). There are four quadrants in operant conditioning. Below is a description of these quadrants and their pros and cons when it comes to dog training.

Positive Reinforcement

Giving something positive to the dog when they perform a desired behavior. This can be anything from food to praise or a toy. An example would be using a piece of food in your hand to bait a dog into sitting and then feeding the dog when the behavior is offered.

Pros: Most effective method for teaching new behavior and creating a positive emotional response in the dog.

Cons: On its own, it will not create reliable obedience when competing motivators, like running deer or other dogs are present. Also, it relies on your dog wanting what you have more than whatever else is available in the environment. For example, a spot on the grass where the local dog pees or squirrels playing on the lawn. Most importantly, it is useless for extinguishing bad behavior.

Negative Reinforcement

Negative reinforcement happens when a behavior is created or strengthened by creating and then removing an aversive stimulus.  An example of this would be pulling up on your dog’s collar to make him sit. When the dog sits, you stop pulling, thus removing the mildly unpleasant sensation when the desired behavior is offered. Basically, if you use a leash, you use negative reinforcement whether you like it or not.

Pros: Creates reliable obedience and does not require food to work. Also, works well for dogs that are easily distracted and more prone to self satisfy in the environment. When paired with positive reinforcement this supercharges your training as you are now using more than one quadrant to create and reinforce behavior. Think of a race car speeding down the road with two barriers on either side to prevent the car from turning off the road until it reaches it’s destination.

Cons: With some dogs this can cause a negative emotional response when done incorrectly, so it is best to graduate the pressure used and pair it with positive reinforcement for optimal success.

Positive Punishment

Positive punishment creates an aversive experience for the dog when an undesirable behavior is offered. An example of this would be a bark collar that delivers an electric stimuli to the dog whenever she barks which causes a decrease and ultimately causes an extinction of the behavior being offered,

Reviews for No Nonsense Dog Training

[Ifedayo Peter Awoniyi · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great Book! This is the best A-Z dog training manual out there