I do read some horse magazines as I feel that we as dog trainers can learn some things from horse trainers. I wanted to share a quote from an article about Clinton Anderson going back to Australia to work with his mentor, Gordon McKinlay. For those of you who might not be familiar with Clinton Anderson, he is a very well known horse trainer and clinician here in the United States. He has a regular TV program on the rural farm network.
The quote that I putting here comes from Gordon McKinlay in this article. I know that this was written for horses, but I think that you can substitute the word dog for horse in a lot of cases.
""Before we bring out the first horse, I want to give you a few things to think about," said Gordon.
"First, you've got to have good feel and timing. Horses learn through repetition. They won't learn if you keep changing what you're doing. Be consistent. A lot of what we are going to be doing the next three days may not make sense to you, either, at first, but it will with repetition. The same is true for the horse.
Second, a horse has a left side and a right side. There is a learning side of the brain and a reactive side of the brain. The reacting part is big and the learning side is small. Our goal at this clinic is to reverse this.
Finally, the horse is a prey animal. They will run from what they don't trust. You cannot force your will on a horse; you have to get their trust first. When you get wild with a horse, it is because you've run out of knowledge. You are the teacher, but in order to teach, you have to have more knowledge than the horse--and therein lies the problem.""
I just thought that I would post this and see if anyone would like to make a comment. We need something to talk about on these winter days. I also have another quote from another article by another horse trainer that I will post at a later date.
I know that timing is also very important for us training our working sheepdogs. If we mistime a correction or if we mistime releasing the pressure of a correction we can end up with problems.
Even tho our dogs are not a prey animal, I still feel that the comment in regards to gaining the animal's trust still applies. And that when we get wild with our dog while training, neither one of us benefits.
2 comments:
I think it would be reasonable to substitute the word "sheep" for "horse" in the part about gaining their trust. I think a dog that gains the sheep's trust fairs much better often than one who doesn't. Neat quotes!
You are so right. We all think about gaining the dog's trust and forget about gaining the sheep trust. I think that both the dog and the handler need to gain a certain amount of the sheep's trust.
I have another horse article that I need to post. Now I need to find it again.
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