Welcome to Pac Talk Podcast episode 159. Today we're going to talk about how to train your dog to listen to you anywhere you go and around anything. Because we all know that if you're training your dog to sit, for example, in your kitchen, you know, your dog will get really good in your kitchen. It'll get really good in your house. But as soon as you go outside, as soon as you go down to the park, you wonder why your dog is no longer sitting for you. And it's not that your dog is stubborn, it's not that your dog is broken. What's happen, what happens is your dog learns to listen in particular contexts. And as you change context or you change environments, you know, you're changing the way that you're operating, you're changing the way that you're moving. And so uh that means that we have to generalize our training. When we generalize our dog's training, that means our dog knows the behavior in a variety of different contexts. And you don't have to make this very complicated. We're going to keep it extremely simple. So we're going to talk about, you know, how to do this today, you know, how to make sure your generalization is on point, how to proof your training. Okay. Um, but like I said, the number one question is why does my dog not why is my dog listening at home, but it's ignoring me outside? That's the number one question a lot of people ask. And like I said, it's not a dog problem. It's a training gap. It's a gap in our training because we have not accomplished generalization uh in our dog's training. And generalization is just, hey, I train my dog in my kitchen, I train my dog in my house, I train my dog in my backyard, I train my dog in my front yard, I train my dog down at the local park, right? So you're kind of taking these different small environments and you're making sure that you're doing your training in a variety of places so that your dog understands that the training that you're doing does apply no matter where you go, right? Um, you know, context does matter, like I've said. So your behavior, your dog's behavior could be tied to the way that you're specifically moving, the way you're specifically communicating, which you might be accidentally changing, you know, the way you're moving your body, the way you're asking your dog to do things, it might change uh as you go to different places. So one thing to think about is keeping the way that you're operating as consistent as possible. When you're giving a command to your dog or you're luring your dog, right, do it the same way no matter where you go. When you're handling your leash, do it the same way. Maintain your expectations as you change environments. So generally, when I'm doing proofing work or when I'm making sure that my dog is, you know, generalizing their training to a bunch of different contexts, there's two main types of environments that people find themselves in. One, you got the person or the family that lives in a house or a townhouse, they have their house, they have their backyard, they have their front yard, right? That's generally a good setup. The other kind of person is uh someone that lives in an apartment complex or something like an apartment complex. They have their apartment, you know, outside of your apartment, depending on how your apartment's set up. You might have a breezeway, you might have just a porch, right? You might have a patio area, it depends on how your apartment's set up. So you have your apartment, you have right outside of your apartment, your breezeway, your patio, your porch, whatever. You have grassy or yard areas around your apartment, potty areas, right? Uh you typically have a community area in the apartment. So think about it. Hey, I'm gonna start my training in the apartment. I'm gonna take it out to my breezeway, I'm gonna take it out to my porch, then I'm gonna go down to the yard area, then I'm gonna go down to the community center. So think about how you're gonna sequentially, systematically generalize your training through all areas that you're routinely in. And once you master the training in these routine training areas, then you might take a little field trip, right? You get in the car, you walk down the street, you go down to another area. Could be a whole nother apartment building. You're just going to a different apartment building and training outside of that building. If you're in a neighborhood, if you're in a townhouse community, you're just walking down the street, right? So even doing that, training in different areas of your little uh living community, that is context difference right there, right? So keep that in mind. We gotta we gotta train through all the contexts. We also have to be aware of competing motivators that are around us, right? So if you're training in your house and and your dog's really good at training, but you go outside and and maybe there's a squirrel or a squirrel or a bird or some type of creature or animal or thing that distracts your dog, that is a competing motivator. You have to make sure that your engagement with your dog is stronger than the competing motivator around you, right? So something to think about that. Um, it's usually if your dog is having trouble shifting environments, it's usually not stubbornness or dominant or domination, dominance. It's usually just a training gap, right? It's just the exposure. We have to, we have to generalize our training, right? So with that being said, there's three main aspects as you're working on your generalization. It's distance, duration, distraction, right? Distance from you to your dog, distance from you to the distraction that's that's around. That could be the squirrel, right? Duration is the amount of time that you're working in that area, right? Distraction could be the squirrel, right? Could be no distractions, like if you're starting in your apartment or in your house. You want to slowly systematically go to more and more difficult distractions. This is a big component of my book, The Ultimate Lease Training Manual. You can get the link to that down in the description below. But in my book, I talk about this process and I step you through the process in my book on how to master your training in one area before you go to the next area, right? So think about it like this: you don't want to train in your living room and then jump straight to a dog park. You don't want to do that because the dog park is going to be very arousing, very exciting, you know, very distracting. You want to start in your living room, like I said, then you want to go to your backyard, then you want to go to your front yard. And it's not that you're just going there to check off the box. You go from your living room to your backyard, and if your dog is having a hard time training in your backyard, you don't move to your front yard until you've mastered the backyard and it's so easy your dog is no longer distracted out there and they listen perfectly. Then when you do that, then you move to the front yard, right? Same kind of concept. You're only moving to the next level up or the next context once your dog is very, very good in that one particular area. So for most people, start in your house, move to your backyard, then move to your front yard. If you're in an apartment, start in your apartment, move to the breezeway, right? Do five minute sessions out in your breezeway or your porch, then move down to the yard areas of the apartment. Another way you could look at it is you have to take your dog outside to go potty anyway. So when you take your dog outside to go potty, wherever you take it potty, after it goes potty, do a short session. And your training sessions, they don't have to be very long, right? They don't have to be uh drawn out things. You can do a quick three-minute, five-minute session, and that's gonna help you, right? Every you go out there consistently, you do that consistently. Every time you take your dog potty, you do three-minute session of eye contact, you do three-minute session of engagement, you do three-minute session of obedience, whatever stage of training that you're working on, whatever part of your training progression that you're working on, do three minutes every time you go outside to go to the bathroom, and then you know, do more sessions in your house if you can. And once you master those areas, then challenge yourself by going to a new area. So I hope that makes sense. That's kind of that's proofing, right? So generally, what you what I would do, start in your house, do your potty training sessions. Once that's done, move to a more difficult place like your front yard or your community center. Once that's easy, go to a local park. And it should be a low-key park or a greenery or a natural nature area, low-key area, not a lot of traffic, not a lot going on. Make sure your dog can do it there, right? Make that place easy. Once that place is easy, go to the next place, which could be another park, but a busier park, a more distracting park, more things going on, right? Do that till it's easy for your dog. Once that's easy for your dog, then go to the next place, right? The next place could be another park that's higher distracting, higher levels of distraction outside of a dog park, right? Where there's more stuff going on. Once that's super easy, then go to a local store. You know, it could be a restaurant where you're practicing your downstay and you're eating a meal while you practice. It could be a local hardware store, like in the United States. We have Home Depot, we have Lowe's, we have Ace Hardware, these kind of stores. You know, take your dog there, practice there, make sure your dog can master the store environment before you move on. Once you move on from there, you're looking for higher level distractions. You're looking for the farmer's market, you're looking for the town festival, you're looking for these kind of things. So just keep that in mind, right? That's how you would kind of systematically progress your training from the low-key environment to the high key environment. And once you're in the high arousal environment, then you know at that point your training is pretty well proofed. But you have to do your training progression properly as well. So, what are you doing in these sessions, right? Well, the first thing I recommend you do is that you build focus before you do more distractions, right? So you do your engagement, which is your dog wanting to pay attention to you, you're giving your dog a reason to check in with you, a reason for your dog to pay attention and want to look at you, right? This is the foundation for all of your training, right? If you don't do any focus training, if you don't do any engagement training, your dog is going to default to looking around at the environment, being more interested in the environment than paying attention to you, right? So do your engagement training, do your do your reward events, do your eye contact training. Once that's done, then you would move to obedience training. You know, you can we have a bunch of videos on our YouTube channel about how to do this stuff, but you would do lures, teach your dog the positions, right? Finalize the cues and commands, implement accountability, do e-collar conditioning. We have a full video on e-collar training, the tutorial for beginners on our YouTube channel. Once you get through the e-collar training, then you focus on pushing the distraction training, right? So you focus on pushing it from that low-key park to the medium park, to the hide park, to the high distraction park, to the hardware store, to the restaurant, to the farmer's market, to the festival, right? That's when you're gradually going to be pushing your distractions as you've kind of accomplished your your training progression, right? And whatever you're doing in the in the uh the easy locations, like your house, your yard, the the low-key park, whatever you're doing there, you do at the higher key distractions too. Your healing is the same, your downstay is the same, your come command is the same, right? You're making sure that all these environments, the same type of behavior is happening. If your dog is struggling, right, as you progress to a new environment, you might have a couple things you need to look at. Number one, maybe you need to not go into that heavy distraction environment or the or the next distraction environment, you go back to a lower level distraction environment. Maybe you need to stay at that environment and make sure that you do more engagement training at that environment because there's a lot going on and you need your dog to understand that even if there's a lot going on, the best thing to do is to still pay attention to you, right? Um, so that's how you want to, that's how you want to kind of think about your progression as you're moving from one phase to the next, right? And as you're doing your uh adjustments in your distractions, right, in your environments, you're gradually changing up, you're gradually increasing the distractions that are there, right? So at the low-key park, you know, there might be some people walking around, there might be some kids walking around, might be some dogs walking around, no big deal, squirrels, birds, whatever. As you go to the medium park, the medium distraction park, more people, more dogs, more kids, bicycles, right? Uh, some traffic, you know, these kind of things. High distraction park, just a lot of activity. People, dogs, kids, people are playing sports, you know, they're doing tennis, they're doing pickleball, they got scooters, whatever, right? Lots of dogs running around, these this kind of thing. And then you go to the hardware store, you know, they got the big shopping carts, they got people shopping, they got other dogs there, they got big trucks coming in and out, forklifts operating, all these kind of things. So, this is why you're systematically increasing your distractions just one level at a time, right? Impulse control training is gonna help you, right? So, as you go through this process, the biggest ways that you're gonna work on your dog's impulse control and self-control is gonna be your engagement training. It's gonna be your stay command, right? So, you really want to make sure as you're progressing your training through these distractions, through these different contexts, that you're really focused on engagement and a stay command. So, if you want to learn more about this, go to YouTube, type in canine revolution dog training, uh, how to teach stay or how to teach stay canine revolution or eye contact drills canine revolution. In the eye contact drill video, I show you how to do the downstay eye contact drill with your dog. This is going to enhance both your stay and it's going to enhance your dog's engagement, right? But engagement and stay are your two big behaviors for impulse control, self-control, your dog checking in with you despite all of the excitement that's going on around you, right? And another thing I get asked about is you know, real-world reliability without food. How do I get my dog to listen without relying on food rewards forever? So you have to start thinking about a shift in your training. You have to know and understand number one, reward schedules, which I've talked about before. But basically, when you're starting off your training, you're gonna start off with a continuous reward schedule where you're rewarding every single repetition that your dog's doing. Then you're gonna go to the second type of reward schedule as your dog is mastering that behavior. That is an intermediate, right, or an interval reward schedule where you're rewarding your dog every so often for doing a behavior. Could be every two repetitions, could be every four repetitions. It's just gonna be up to you on how you do that. And then your final reward schedule is gonna be the random reward schedule where you're randomly rewarding your dog whenever you see fit. It might be sooner, it might be later, it might be this repetition, that repetition, it might be very uh hardly ever, right? Um, but that's basically your reinforcement schedule. So you're gonna move through those in your training. You have to make the judgment call based on your dog, how you're going to move through those reward schedules, but don't get stuck on one. You need to push to get to that random reinforcement schedule as quickly as you can. The other thing that you need to think about uh to not get stuck on food rewards forever is implementing fair accountability. You have to teach your dog, right? That, hey, through this process, I'm teaching you the expectation of behavior. If you cross the line, now I'm gonna teach you about a correction, which is part of your training progression. It shouldn't come at the very beginning. Don't start training with a trainer who's putting the e-collar on day one, right? You want a trainer that's gonna take you through relationship building, luring, and rewarding, and then corrections and e-collar training later, right? So you want to make sure you have the ability to hold your dog accountable, the ability to correct your dog for stepping out of line and make sure your dog understands that correction is for breaking an expectation. And when they've done that, then they get that reward, right? And then you go to the random reward schedule for corrections as well. Just because you correct your dog doesn't mean you can't reward it for doing the right thing. Your dog gets corrected for stepping out of line, breaking a boundary, a rule, an expectation. Your dog gets rewarded randomly for making good decisions and doing the right thing and paying attention to you, right? So we need to have good reliability on the behavior. We need to have good self-control. We need to have good impulse control. We need to shift our rewarding over time as we're doing our training from the continuous reinforcement schedule to the random reinforcement schedule as time goes on, right? But some of the big mistakes I see people uh, you know, making with their dogs is they train only at their house and they're saying, Oh, my dog's trained. My dog can stay for 15 seconds at my house. Uh-uh. Nope. I don't consider a stay done until your dog can stay as long as you need it to at your house and wherever you go. And I usually prove that at a restaurant, right? Most people like to go out to eat with their dog. You should be able to go out to eat with your dog. Your dogs sit right there on the patio with you, and uh they stay there until you tell them it's okay to get up. If your dog's friendly with people, it should be able to be pet by people while it's laying down and not feel like it has to get up when that's happening, right? Uh, if you do, you know, treat only training, reward-based only training, you know, you're gonna really have a hard time with your dog listening without the reward. Systematically, what you want to do with balance training is you know, change your reinforcement schedules as time goes on. Continuous reinforcement, interval reinforcement, random reinforcement, implement accountability, teach it, you know, in a fair way to your dog that way they understand what your expectation is and what happens if they break an expectation, right? Remember that reliability with your dog is built in layers. Your dog doesn't just know how to do X, Y, Z. Just because you did something in your kitchen doesn't mean your dog's gonna do it at the park immediately. You have to make sure that you're systematically, progressively generalizing your training no matter where you go. And like I said, if you if you go from your house to a park and your dog's really struggling, it's not because your dog is stubborn. It's not because your dog is uh dominant, it's not because your dog is a beagle or whatever. It's because your dog hasn't had the repetitions put in to help transfer that training from one context, which is your house, to the next context, which is the park. So you got to take the time to do that, right? So if you guys uh you know found value from this discussion, let me know in the comments down below wherever you're watching. Please leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. Also, if you're watching on YouTube, you know, subscribe to the channel if you haven't already. Um, but if you are listening on a podcast platform, we really appreciate you leaving us a review on that platform. If you need help with your training, first of all, I wrote a book. It's called The Ultimate Lease Training Manual: Five Steps to a Well Behaved Dog. In the book, I take you through this process on how to generalize your training, no matter where you want to go with your dog. If you want that book, it's $9.99 on Amazon for the for the paperback. Right? I do have an audio book as well on Amazon that I read myself. And there's the ebook on Amazon as well. Um, but the link is down in the description below. You can grab that book if you want to. Also, we have our six-step free training guide down in the link below. You can grab that free training guide, train your dog yourself. We also have our library of content on our YouTube channel, right? If there's a video you need us to do that you can't find on our channel, just comment on YouTube on one video or multiple videos, and uh you'll get our attention and we'll put it into our training cycle. But if you need help with your dog's training, we have board and train programs. We're located in Somerville, Charleston, South Carolina. But, you know, people bring their dogs here from all over the country, all over the United States. They bring them from Texas, they bring them from California, they bring them from Massachusetts, they bring them from Virginia, Georgia, Florida. Doesn't matter. We're happy to train your dog and work with you. If you don't want to do a board and train program, we have virtual coaching with me or trainer Chris. You can go down to the link in the description below to get information on that as well. We also have Canine Revolution apparel on Amazon. Link in the description below. If you want to represent, get a canine revolution logo shirt, canine revolution logo hoodie, or a mug or whatever you want, right? Uh we also have the coloring book that's on Amazon as well, the I Love Dogs coloring book. And we have a bunch of affiliates. We only work with affiliates that are going to actually bring benefit to you and your dog. We do have some raw food affiliates that will ship raw food directly to your door with discount codes. We have Canine Super Supplements, the best dog supplements you can get. Uh discount code down below as well. Uh Monster Canine Toys, Jocko Fuel. So if you're interested in getting some good stuff for your dog that are approved by us, you can go down to the link in the description below. And I appreciate you being here. I'll see you guys in the next podcast or YouTube video. This is Chad Pac Talk Podcast out.