I've often said dog training is like a conversation between two friends, but I'd like to ask

you, is your conversation eroding the trust between you and your dog or building it up.

Hi, I'm Susan Garrett and I'm trying to help people be better dog trainers

for their dogs. And what I see is a very common mistake. And it's a mistake that's put a lot

of assumptions into dog training. And today I'm going to give an example of how you teach a dog

to retrieve. So I'd like to have you start thinking about, if you had a new puppy or a rescue dog,

how would you go about teaching that dog to retrieve anything to you?

You know, let's just say a toy. Let's start with a toy. Because traditionally,

any kind of training happens in one of two ways. It's a lured behavior in that,

I don't know, I guess it would be difficult to lure a dog to retrieve something. But

traditionally, behaviors are trained either with a food lure to get a dog to follow that. And

in that case, you create the behavior with food, but the dog really doesn't understand

the behavior. It relies on many, many repetitions of you luring and the hope that the dog

will identify the pattern. We're patterning the repetition. And after hundreds of patterns

of getting them to do the thing, they will figure out what that thing

is. That's one way people have been training a dog. Another way is what my mentor, Bob Bailey,

calls lumping behavior. And that is, you create behavior either through encouragement or through

enticement. And quite often the retrieve falls into that one. I'll

get to that later. But think about this. This has happened to me and maybe it's happened to you.

I have traveled to many European countries for the Dog Agility World Championships.

And in many of these countries, people don't speak English.

And so, I like to go to the grocery store and buy fresh fruits and vegetables. Being a vegan,

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