Let the Dog Decide

In this book you will find facts about dogs and dog training that you have never heard from any other dog trainer or read in any other dog training book. In addition to explaining what you must know about all dogs, different breeds, breeders, and animal shelters, in order to get the right dog for you and your family, I am going to share a unique system of concepts, principles, and methods for training dogs.

My training system:

• Accepts the dog’s independent will, insatiable curiosity, and strong instinctual drives, not as problems that training must seek to control, but as fortunate natural attributes that can be recruited on behalf of effective learning.

• Introduces the concept of building benevolent eye contact with the dog, and explains how to do it even with a fearfully aggressive or withdrawn dog. If you take nothing else from this book, building benevolent eye contact alone will transform your relationship with a dog in profoundly positive ways.

• Achieves unprecedented reliability in the dog’s behavior by training on a small bench.

• Teaches the dog to escape from compulsion into compliance, and never asks the dog to do anything without first providing that escape.

• Limits use of the leash – the worst enemy of good training – with the innovative use of long lines attached to a flat collar, making it possible for the first time to combine painless covert control of the dog with overt positive reinforcement, thereby freeing the dog’s mind to drive its own learning.

• Produces a dog whose cooperative obedience is self-directed, and both leash- and handler-independent.

• Does not advise the use of choke chains, avoiding the problems inherent in their use. Introduces innovative techniques for using the Halti as a safe, nonviolent alternative.

• Limits stress on both you and your dog with an easy-to-follow program of informal handling, quiet time, and three formal five-minute training sessions a day.