Hi! I’m Melanie McLeroy with Taurus Training for Expert Village and today we’re going to talk about puppies. So now let’s talk about teaching your puppy his or her name. There are a lot of people say their puppies, their kids and their spouse’s names a lot without getting a reaction. You really want your puppy to learn his name and use the name as kind of an all around attention getter, it means to make eye contact, it means to stop what you’re doing, come to you every thing, but your puppy’s name has to have something very positive associated with it at all times or that’s not going to happen. Try to never say your puppy’s or your dog’s name in anger, however that is a really human thing to do, especially if you have more than one dog, so don’t beat yourself up over it, but try to engender awareness. If you haven’t already please look at the pre-training videos that talk a lot about awareness and attention, good boy. So this little puppy’s name is Barto and I’m going to teach him to respond to that name in a certain high pitched tone of voice. I have my reinforcement ready. Barto, good, very nice. So I said his name and as soon as he made eye contact, I marked it and then reinforced it. Barto, good. Oh! Oh! this puppy is almost too good, no freebies. Barto, good, now there he wanted to cheat a little bit. I’m going to try to move him around so you can see better. Barto, see that was a cheat. Good… a little flick of eye contact is not true eye contact. You want the eye contact to acknowledge that you’re in control of resources and then he’s asking nicely for something. So I’m introducing some distractions, the crinkling of the cheese wrappers, the one that always gets him. Barto. Good. Excellent. So you see it can take some time, but if you move slowly, gradually increase the distractions around which your puppy works, whether it’s the name game, paying attention or any other command then you’ll set your puppy up to succeed. Little puppy. Barto.
