Dog Hiking Foundations (Wk 1)
Week One
Hello from all of us at A Dog’s Life headquarters!
If you’ve been thinking that you want your own dog to enjoy the great outdoors on one of our off-leash group hikes, let us just say…
We can’t wait to have your pup alongside us on the trails!
We love working with and helping guide each and every one of our dogs towards being a model canine citizen. On the hikes, we’re always rewarding the dogs for good choices and good behavior, managing them and setting them up for success in any way we can, and helping them out if they’re struggling a bit with some area of good hiking etiquette.
Before our dogs get to enjoy life off-leash with us like this, however, there are some key areas of training and behavior they need to have already preloaded to be successful with us!
If you’re looking to sign your pup up for these hikes, want to help your dog be a better hiker for your own adventures, or are already on our waitlist and just eagerly anticipating the moment a spot opens up for them- we have a plan you can follow at home to help get them ready! The better prepared they are, the quicker and more easily they can jump into group hikes like ours.
Over the course of the next 6 weeks, we’ll be posting all sorts of tips and advice that will help you and your pup better prepare for the trails and meet these goals when the time comes. We know no dog is perfect! They aren't robots, they have good and bad days… but all of these skills become useful and often essential to a successful group hike so we do our best to help our pups have a great time but still learn along the way.
One helpful tip that we’ve used on many past pups and current hikers is to use mealtimes to your advantage to create more work ethic and drive in your pup so that all the training you do is just a bit more effective! If you have a foodie pup who gobbles down anything they can the moment it’s offered- you may not need to pay much attention to the next bits! But if your pup nibbles at their food throughout the day, can be picky about what they eat, is unreliable about eating at mealtimes, or tends to refuse food especially when nervous, this tip is for you!
Most of the training we do with our pups involves some sort of reward or motivation system- we need ways to pay our dogs for good behavior! If they don’t care about what we have to offer, they won’t care to repeat that behavior very reliably. Bringing more structure to mealtime helps us achieve this rather quickly and use that increased food motivation to get better training results, faster.
While we’re talking about food… rather than feed from a bowl at ALL, we have another tip for you! And this one will help you out with more than just hiking skills.
This protocol is one we use with a TON of our training clients because it gives surprisingly nice results with surprisingly little effort! SMART is an acronym for See Mark And Reward Training. The x50 is how many times per day you should aim to do it! To better translate…
You SEE (watch your dog and notice) when they are doing something good - even without you asking! In fact, preferably when you’re not even asking.
You MARK (tell your dog they’re awesome using a “yes,” “good boy,” or click of a clicker) the behavior the moment you see it to give your pup a snapshot of what it is they’re about to be praised and rewarded for.
AND you REWARD (give your dog something they like, such as a treat, a bit of their dinner, playtime, or some of their favorite pets) them for the good choice or good behavior so that they’re more likely to repeat it in the future.
This TRAINING helps your pup to make ore good choices on their own because it pays well for them to do so! And when they know what good choices to make, they make less of the bad choices. It also shows them that they can be a part of this system of communication back and forth with you, that training is fun! If you do something I like, I’ll pay you for it!
