Training for life: Introducing Sparkle’s Adventures

​Life Begins Outside of Your Comfort Zone – Neale Donald Walshe
 
About every 2 months Harmony Dog Training graduates a new class of dogs in our Reactive Rover, Puppy Preschool, and Basic Manners classes. During graduation we tell people that this is just the beginning. While I hope that our students take this to heart, I imagine that for some, the training ends the moment they hang their dog’s “diploma” on their refrigerator. I do not think that this is because they are not interested in doing more with their dog, it’s just that for many people, it’s not obvious what training is outside of the context of a class, and how this “real life” training can help them have more fun with their canine companion. To help anyone who wonders how training achieve this, I want to share with you the training that I am going to be doing as I prepare one of our dogs for an adventure this spring. 

​This Sparkle. She is a 1.5-year-old Australian Shepherd that we adopted over the summer. Sparkle comes to us with unlimited enthusiasm and limited training.  She loves the outdoors and is extremely difficult to tire out.

This is Lowell. He is a 41-year-old dog trainer, the co-owner of Harmony Dog Training in Ann Arbor with his wife, Angela and our family of dogs, cats, and birds.  He has been looking for a way to spend more time training his own dog. He loves the outdoors and is extremely difficult to tire out. He's the one writing this blog.

Source: Clifton-Fine Economic Development Corporation

This is Cranberry Lake, the third largest lake in the Adirondacks. In 6 months we plan to complete a 4 day, 50 mile circumnavigation of the lake (known as the Cranberry Lake 50.)  We’re doing it for the challenge and for another very important reason. If you complete it, you get a patch to add to your backpack (or in our case, backpacks). 

To make the process enjoyable to both of us, I’m going to make my best efforts to follow these three principles:

1. Safety: I will do only what I feel is safe for Sparkle or myself
2. Respect: I will only use training methods that maximize choice and positive reinforcement of desired behaviors/associations
3. Flexibility: I will allow myself to change scope, direction, priorities as needed based on the requirements of the first two principles.

​In future posts, I’ll be sharing our preparations with you in hopes that you may be informed, entertained, and hopefully inspired to have an adventure of your own.