"This dates me,” says Marilyn Pona, founder of Assistance Dogs for Living, “but I used to use the reference of the original Karate Kid” (the 1984 film starring Ralph Macchio, not Will Smith’s son). After waxing the car and painting the fence, the student finally asks the karate master, “‘When do I do karate?’ And the master said, ‘You always do karate—your life is karate.’”
The same is true of training a new dog—minus the headband and cheesy Joe Esposito number.
“Communication is training,” says Pona. “I don’t like for people to think of it as you put on your khaki suit and don your whistle and put the leash on the dog and go practice.” Instead, she stresses the importance of simply spending time together—what she calls “preconditioning,” or learning how your dog reacts to the world.
The first hurdle is building trust, which comes as you establish when and where the dog eats and sleeps. “You can take a dog that’s had some pretty bad experiences and start to create some balance in its life by just establishing patterns like that,” she says. “Dogs really understand life patterns—when you get up and go to sleep, even when it’s a weekend and you don’t have to get up early.” Pets spend a lot of time simply studying their masters’ body language: “They don’t watch TV; they watch you.”
Rather than going to a training class right away, Pona suggests first working with the dog in an environment with few distractions. The first step is training for touch, in which the dog allows you to pet it from nose to tail. “That’s not necessarily easy, because you’re doing what they consider dominance,” she says.
Once you’re comfortable with each other, it’s time to teach the basics. “The average pet isn’t going to be competing in Westminster or a dog show,” says Pona. “He needs to come when he’s called, because that one skill can save his life.” It’s a direction so basic that you can practice in your living room, while watching TV. When the dog gets a drink, for instance, call him back afterward and reward him with praise.
Next are the other basics: one-word commands like sit, down, and stay. “It’s one thing at a time,” she says, noting that a dog’s cognition is roughly the same as a 9-month-old child who uses simple words like mama and dada. “That’s what you’re dealing with on a cognitive training level of a dog.”
For some dogs, it can take an extra nudge; for instance, Pona recently taught a lab mix to stop jumping on people by having the owner stand on the leash and praising the dog when it stayed. “We made the dog an offer he couldn’t refuse,” she says. The same is true while walking your dog: She recommends a 5- or 6-foot leash, rather than an extend-a-leash, which is “made for exercise, not training.”
At the end of the day, it comes back to Pona’s Karate Kid analogy: remembering the basics and being patient. “Things don’t go from short-term memory to long-term memory in dogs very fast,” she says, estimating that it takes at least 30 days for a command to truly stick. “Rather than approach this with the chair-and-whip theory, ask, ‘How can we change their life pattern?"
