How to Use a Prong Collar as a Basic Dog Training Tool

Video Transcript

" Hi! I am Melanie McLeroy with Taurus Training for Expert Village and today we are going to talk about training dogs. So here we are with Cody who has an issue with obeying her owner when she gives commands right away. She often needs several repetitions before she will do something. So what we are going to talk about is how to go from luring with continuous reinforcement to intermittent reinforcement. If you reward your dog every single time they do something right, it actually makes the possibility of them performing the behavior again less likely to happen. Intermittent or preferably random reinforcement is definitely the way to go. So random reinforcement is what we are going to work on with Cody. In the last video, you saw that Cody was very dependent upon the food as a lure. We are going to try to speed her up and start throwing things at her randomly and that will make her understand she needs to move more quickly. Cody, sit, good, so I am going to start with luring her with the food, down, good, okay, up… I think she was cheating a little bit there, down, good. So I am waiting until her chest actually hits the ground, okay, before I give her the food, sit, down, good, okay, sit. Now we are going to try it without rewarding with the food. Down, that was a no reward marker, because she did not all the way down. Down, good, good girl, okay. Now that was particularly good, so I added a little bit more praise, That praise can be very helpful contextually to help your dog understand that they did something particularly well. Good girl, good, down, good, okay, no food, down, good, okay, oh, we’re busy chewing, okay, sit down, good, no food, okay, sit down, good, excellent, okay, sit down, good, okay. So we have already in less than two minutes gotten Cody to the point that I do not even have to hold the food in my hand and she is responding very quickly. "