Rspca Dog Training

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A question about positive training methods?

I took our rescue dog to a training course today run by the RSPCA (Australia). He's two, most of the dogs were puppies around 6 months old. Our dog is lovely but can get nervous around other dogs and has a tendency to growl so I though obedience in a class setting would be good.

Anyway, their philosophy is "reward the good, ignore the bad". So if he lunges at another dog I am supposed to turn and walk away, then reward when he is doing the right thing. What I'm not sure about is that if I don't correct him when he does the wrong thing, might he want to do that again? If barking at a dog gets it to run away and I don't react, then won't he do that again because it worked? I'm so confused because there are so many different training philosophies out there. Generally I reward good behaviour but give a quick correction (eg NO! or a quick tug on the leash) for undesirable stuff. They don't allow the correction at all. Can anyone explain to me how it works...and does it work?

I disagree with positive only training. I think in scenarios you gave, it can make a dog dangerous. I don't see anything wrong with saying no. As long as you know your dog and know what is the appropriate degree of correction, and aren't too easy or hard on the dog, correction along with rewards are the best way of training. Though you can't do only one or the other.

When training my dogs, I train a command with treats, when they've got it down pretty well I expect them to do it, every time. If they ignore me, they get a correction, and btw being slow is not listening.

Fun dog training & tricks - RSPCA Queensland Demo Team


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