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    Who’S the Alpha?: Easy Step-By-Step Training for a Great Canine Citizen
    Who’S the Alpha?: Easy Step-By-Step Training for a Great Canine Citizen
    Who’S the Alpha?: Easy Step-By-Step Training for a Great Canine Citizen
    Ebook154 pages2 hours

    Who’S the Alpha?: Easy Step-By-Step Training for a Great Canine Citizen

    By Alan Berg

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    About this ebook

    Are you a first time dog owner, or someone who just wants to be the best dog owner possible? Are you taking in a new puppy, or thinking about rescuing an older dog? Or perhaps your current pet is not so well behaved. Whatever your circumstance and motivation, Whos the Alpha? will help you train your dog to be the best citizen she can be!

    Alan Berg relies on his forty years of experience handling and training dogs to share a unique day-by-day approach with guaranteed quick results that teaches puppy or rescue dog owners how to

    reliably potty train in just a few weeks;
    understand a dogs behavior and personality;
    develop a trusting relationship;
    train a dog to its full potential;
    solve problem behaviors;
    instruct for advanced behaviors; and
    teach entertaining and challenging tricks.

    Whos the Alpha? shares positive training steps and exercises that will help dog owners successfully lead their best furry friends through their first few weeks of life and ultimately transform their beloved companion into a happy and healthy member of the family pack. Alan will tell you in clear, concise language what to do, when to do it, and why. Every training step, from the first day you bring your new family member home, is detailed and explained.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAbbott Press
    Release dateDec 6, 2012
    ISBN9781458206503
    Who’S the Alpha?: Easy Step-By-Step Training for a Great Canine Citizen
    Author

    Alan Berg

    Alan Berg, is retired from senior engineering management with 17 patents. He has forty years experience handling dogs. Alan and his wife, Pamela, live in Sandy, Utah with their two Border Collies.

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      Book preview

      Who’S the Alpha? - Alan Berg

      Contents

      Section 1

      Dog Behavior

      What You Need To Know Before

      Socialization--For Young and Old

      Training--Who’s The Alpha?

      Reward and Punishment

      Section 2

      Home Sweet Home

      What’s Yours is Mine

      Worldliness Training

      Separation Training

      Attentiveness--Watch the Alpha

      FAQ’s

      Play to Train

      Month One--To Do List

      Come

      Sit

      Lay Down/Down

      Wait/Stay

      Heel--Companionship

      Door and Gate Training

      Formal Classes

      Off Leash

      Zone of Comfort

      Meet and Greet

      Congratulations!!!!!!!!!!!!

      Section 3

      Your Angel is NOT/Bad Behavior

      Chewing

      Potty ‘NOT’ Training

      Barking and Howling

      Jumping

      Garbage In/Garbage Out

      Counter Surfing

      Aggression (Fighting and Snapping)

      Off Leash Problems

      Soft Mouth ‘NOT’

      Stool Eating

      Submissive Peeing

      Section 4

      Higher Education

      Fetch and Carry

      Leave It

      Delivery Girl

      Left, Right, and Center--Curb Training

      Drop

      Sniff It Out

      Poison Proofing

      Hand Signals

      Section 5

      Let the Games Begin

      Sit Up

      Dance

      Shake Hands

      High Five

      Die Hard

      Roll Over

      Crawl

      It’s Open and Shut

      etc, etc, etc

      Dedication

      I dedicate this book to the four-legged members of my family, particularly Mia and Shadow, the two Border Collies who currently share our home. They represent my method of training in version 10.0 (Mia) and version 10.5 (Shadow, the beneficiary of the most current evolution of my training method). I could write a book just about the differences in these two loving and lovely BFF’s (Best Furry Friends) because of the evolution of my training method over the 6 years between when we brought Mia and then Shadow into our home.

      I would also like to acknowledge the help of my two grown children, Michael and Jenny, who have grown up with dogs and done their fair share of training. Their experiences played an important part in shaping my thinking on training.

      And my heartfelt thanks to my lovely wife, Pamela, for her patience and forbearance--not just in letting me write and obsess over this book, but in putting up with me in general these many years.

      Finally, I would also like to thank my friends Bob and Irene Gale, and Alan and Karen Kellogg, dog lovers all, for reading portions of my training manual and providing honest, if brutal, feedback along the way.

      And to you the reader, I say have fun with the book--and with your own furry family member(s). My greatest hope is that this training manual will enhance your experiences together.

      Preface

      If you have read a few dog training books, you were probably struck by the effort the authors spent at the beginning of their book (and sometimes all the way through the book) on touting their knowledge or experience, on how many dogs they have trained, and on why their methods are so much better than everyone else’s.

      I make no such claims. I am just a guy, like you, who loves dogs. What I do have going for me is a lifetime of association with dogs, my own and dogs that have intersected my life through friends and family. I also seem to have a knack for observing and interpreting a dog’s behavior, and of communicating with most all dogs with whom I have come in contact. I have supplemented this knack with many years of research on behavioral science results, and trial and error with a variety of dog training methods. Now, some forty years later, I believe I have a philosophy that plugs into a dog’s natural instincts and gives good and reliable training results. Given my history and my interest in helping humans help their furry friends, I decided to write down what I have learned and how it works.

      Again, I do not claim that my methods are the best or the only way to train your dog, but they do work. And if you follow my methods, you will be happily surprised with your ability to get your companion to behave the way she should--as a good citizen.

      As you will learn in greater detail in the coming chapters, the first month with your new best friend is the most critical time, whether she is an 8 week old puppy or an 8 year old rescue.

      The fact that you have purchased this training manual or any dog book for that matter indicates that you take your responsibilities seriously. But between work, family and well, life in general, you may not feel you have time to study this book from cover to cover.

      So if you’re pressed for time or are just eager to jump right in to the dog owner world, here’s a suggestion: skip to Home Sweet Home, and then go straight to Month One--To Do List. Follow the suggested reading by day and week as listed there.

      Also, it seems to me that most dog training books try to cover ‘everything’. They talk about what kind of dog, how to find one, where to get them, what kind of food, etc.

      Although all this information is absolutely important to being a good human for your dog and giving your four-legged friend the best life possible, there are plenty of other books that do a great job of discussing all these topics. Check out the last section of this book for additional reading suggestions.

      I intend to focus almost exclusively and completely on how to train your dog to his/her full potential; how to make your pet a good citizen and a joy in your household. As a result, this guide book will be ‘short and to the point’. By the way, just like humans, dogs come in two sexes. But for consistency’s sake, in this guide book I will only use the female pronoun for our furry friends.

      Most training exercises will only take up a couple printed pages to describe. I have deliberately kept each lesson’s explanation short and efficient. For the basic training (Section 2), I have parred down to what I consider the good citizen behaviors necessary in every day life.

      Let me reemphasize that the point of my training method is to help you mold your furry friend into a good citizen and a great companion for you and your family. If you want to compete in AKC Obedience Trials, for instance, this manual will not get you to that point....at least not by itself (See the end of the Chapter called CONGRATULATIONS).

      This manual is divided into five sections:

      » Section 1 will focus on general information that will help you understand your canine.

      » Section 2 presents the actual training exercises to bring you and your canine through the basic obedience behaviors required to make your companion a good citizen.

      » Section 3 focuses on some examples of problem behavior and how to solve them.

      » Section 4 presents advanced behaviors that will keep you and your BFF entertained for years to come.

      » Section 5 is an accumulation of fun tricks.

      Section 1

      Dog Behavior

      Domestic dogs are believed to be descendant from Eurasian gray wolves, but tens of thousands of years of domesticated living have made them a different animal. To be sure, it’s undeniable that dogs still share many of the wolf’s basic characteristics. And, if you observe dogs carefully, you will still see the rudiments of wolf pack behavior in the wild (not artificial groups of wolves thrown together in captivity). And we have certainly modified these domestic canid’s behavior to suit our needs. For instance, we have modified their hunting instincts to retrieve game (and bring it back without chewing or eating it) or herd animals and move them about as we want (without eating them).

      tanja_askani_wolf_dog_friends.jpg

      Wolf and Dog

      Ultimately, there may have been nothing special about the wolf that got singled out for domestication: perhaps it just happened to be the social canid that was in the right place at the right time.

      I have this picture in my head of one of our cave dwelling hunter ancestors sitting around his fire enjoying a big dinner after a very successful hunt and a prehistoric wolf-like animal standing just outside the light hoping for some scraps. Perhaps the cave dweller just had too much food left, or perhaps he just wanted to see what would happen. Whatever the reason, he threw scraps to the wolf. Being a smart guy, the wolf thinks Hey, this might be the start of a better life. This human could be a good guy to team up with. As time went on, they both found that they could benefit from working together. And that, as they say, was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

      Dogs, like wolves, are social, pack oriented (when I say pack, read ‘family’), den-dwelling, predatory animals. Thousands of years of domestication, however, have produced a subspecies of the Eurasian gray wolf, Canis Lupus Familiaris (the modern dog), that given a choice would almost always prefer a family (read ‘pack’) of humans to a pack of dogs and would generally avoid a pack of wolves. A recent study conclusively proved that domestic dogs do indeed bond more strongly with people than with other dogs.

      Equating the word pack with family is a relatively new twist on our understanding of our canine friends. For many years, scientists tried to interpret domestic dog behavior by observing the behavior of captive wolves. Captured wolves seemed to be in a constant struggle to get and keep their status in the pack. The strongest, smartest, most ruthless wolf gets to be Alpha for as long as he can hold on to the position.

      Unfortunately for us dog trainers and all dog owners across the globe, no one understood that the packs in captivity were not representative of the wild wolf pack. Captured wolves were thrown together into artificial packs forced together by their captors. In most cases, these wolves were not related by family, and may never have met until they were thrown together in a cage. In hind sight no one should have been surprised that these captured wolves would fight over everything.

      In the wild, we have observed that packs are always extended family units where older siblings stay with the rest of the pack, share the responsibilities of care giving, providing food, and protecting each other. There is almost no strife over position or status within a wild wolf pack.

      IMG_4078.jpg

      On Leash in busy store

      We have also observed that it is a very contentious and dangerous situation when a lone wolf tries

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