This Introduction to the Beginning Course of the Dog Science
Dog Training Workshop is part of the Dog Science Network
Go to the Index of the beginning workshop
Comprehensive Behavioral Conditioning for DogsIntroduction to the Beginning Workshop
It has been reported to the webmaster of this site that people are sometimes perplexed after looking through the index for the first part of the beginning workshop, because they expect to see a list of problems to be solved. Like one woman who reportedly came here for guidance after her dog took to digging in the backyard. She was searching through the index for some mention of that specific problem, and was puzzled as to why she couldn't find any reference to that particular thing.
The reason this workshop does not catalog problems and list their solutions is that this venue is not about solving specific problems. Rather, it is about raising your dog in a way that will ensure that you will never have any problems with him to begin with.
It is about a way of understanding your dog and influencing the animal's behavior, as you continually and incessantly interact with him in a way that ensures that no problems ever have a chance to develop in the first place. It is about the science of influencing your dog's behavior by arranging your own behavior.
If you know how to behave the way you must in order to ensure your dog's behavior, and you interact with your dog in that fashion right from puppyhood on into his adult years, then, throughout his life, your dog's behavior will at all times be exemplary - or pretty damn close to it.
It is true that before you complete the beginning workshop, we will tell you everything you need to know in order to stop your dog from digging or doing anything else that you don't want him to do. But this first segment of the workshop is about learning to control your dog's behavior by being meticulous in the way you react to what he does. Once you know how to do that, then, you will know for yourself how to apply those skills to the resolution of any particular problem - like digging.
But this is not a problem solving workshop per se, in the sense that it is not about looking up individual problems and learning how to deal with them one by one. Rather, what you will find here is an approach in which you first must absorb a body of knowledge that you will find developed on these pages in sequential fashion. Then, to really make it work for you, you must develop a set of skills to go with it.
It is what B.F. Skinner called a technology of behavior. Indeed, what you will find here is an extremely efficient, functional psychology of the canine. Not a psychology of the bovine excretory variety, of which we are all so familiar, but an applied psychology of the dog. One that really does work amazingly well.
Once you know how to work it, if you go to the trouble of getting in the habit of working it right, you will find that you have one extraordinarily well behaved dog on you hands.
Click here for a list of what you can expect to learn.