Michael Ellis - When Do I Teach My Puppy to Out?

I think one of the biggest mistakes that people make with puppies in play is they want to make rules too fast for the vast majority of puppies right and so the question is like when do I teach a dog to let go of something so let's say my dog is now started to play tug of war and chase stuff when and how do I teach him to let go of it right and so for the vast majority of dogs when I'm playing I don't teach them to let go of objects to out we would say it until after they're done teething they're six or seven months old at least before I start to teach them to let go of stuff right and the way I get out of stuff before that is that I trade them at the end of something but I don't I'm not teaching them to let go in play I want them to want to hold on to the object right and for most of our dogs the out starts later now there are precocious dogs that you teach it a little sooner than that right and it's based on the intensity with which the dogs are doing things so my dog that I was playing with yesterday I taught him to out when he was 12 weeks old right but he was he's freaky he's not normal like I can you bite a tug and I could pick it up and carry him across the yard hanging on it and he's like hey like he's really really biting it like he's super into it and so at that point we teach him to let go most puppies if they're too young and you start teaching them to let go they lose dedication to the activity yeah yeah yeah so yeah and yeah so one of the others is really sensitive and really compliant if you if you do too much control when they're young then they're always holding themself back they're sort of self inhibiting themselves in terms of their play and generally speaking for most in most cases it depends on how you do it it depends a little bit on the dog's temperament but generally speaking rule making conflicts with intensity in play right so and if I make a lot of rules right off the bat then the dog the dog goes that I thought I like this activity but it's a drag right and so I have to balance that rule making it's the same like when I first started in dogs I took it my very first dog training class was a obedience class at the German Shepherd Dog Club of San Diego when I was 12 right a dog took the class and at that time everybody trained everything with pressure everything was a hundred percent choke chain obedience and the general rule of thumb hanging around all the AKC training circles the AKC obedience people and stuff is you never played tug-of-war with a dog like the whole thing was don't play tug with your dog if you're teaching them how to bite and for sure if you play tug-of-war with your dog your dogs gonna kill you in your sleep right there's no doubt like they said you can't do this it's it's a bad idea and so of course that turns out not to be true and over time that attitude changed a little bit but the next phase of the attitude was well okay you can play tug with your dog but you always have to win you have to control the object that to let go and you say they can't they can't play unless you tell them they can play and at the end you always get the item and keep it so you're in control well it is a rare like unicorn rare puppy that will continue to play with you if you play like that if you make all those rules right off the bat the puppies like this sucks I don't want to play this I thought this was fun but it is not fun at all it's way too many rules and so you have to build some commitment to the activity before you can actually start the rules and it's different from dog to dog so what tends to happen is we get our dogs playing they're playing well we start to add a little bit of control and we see how they do with it if they're responding well good we can keep going if they seem really inhibited after the control I may need to back off again for a little while build a back up again and come back at it again later and so there may be one dog that I can teach to out when they're really young and they still play really well and there's another dog I have to wait until they're nine months old or a year old or whatever to teach them to let go and there are certain dogs that you can never be too strict about the control that's the other thing this is something that we're not really concerned with in puppyhood but later on you will there are certain dogs that if I demand perfect control from them they they you won't have the motivation you need and you see certain dogs and agility and obedience and things like that who are a little reluctant to let go of things they have what we call bad outs right like very slow to let go of stuff when you want them to but if you demanded that they out immediately and may were strict about that they'd stop playing you lose their passion they just can't support it and so it's a little bit of a puzzle for us to me it's one of the interesting things in dog training balancing motivation and control is what makes a lot of the things that we do in dog training interesting it's a they're puzzles just getting your dog to be under controls one not that hard just getting your dog to be crazy it's not that hard getting both it's kind of hard Hank and it's different with every dog having a dog that's really wound up to play or do whatever activities and having control of the activities but it starts in puppyhood but in puppyhood we tend to err on very little control of the thing so I won't out my puppy when I want to end my sessions I trade them something else so that there's no conflict over that like I'll trade food to get the toy from the very end when I'm finishing the sessions I do what we do a lot of play with the puppy encourage you to bring something to us play with them encourage to bring some in the whole session a common puppy play session would be me taking out a little toy waving it around the puppy grabs it I tug a little bit I let the puppy have it I run from the puppy the puppy comes to me I tug a little bit I have it let him have it I run from them they come to me I tug a little bit I let him have it I run from him and I do that five or six times and then I put him up and that was a play session and what they learned is hold onto this object bring it to me and if you bring it to me the game starts back up again and so that's common for the puppies that don't tug of course then we'll do a little more chasing stuff first building chase [Music]

Channel: Leerburg

Views: 6,545

Rating: 4.8899083 out of 5

Keywords: Dog Training, Dog Trainer, Puppy, Dog Obedience, Dog Videos, Puppy Behavior, Puppy Obedience, Michael Ellis, Teaching My Puppy to Out, My Puppy Wont Out, Dog Behavior, Puppy Videos, Working Dog, Agility, California, Menomonie Wisconsin, Wisconsin

Id: DE8Eu56u8cQ

Length: 6min 8sec (368 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 01 2019