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. Welcome to Shape by Dog. And today's podcast is kind of a summary of past

podcasts, but it also has been prompted by some of the training that I have in being encouraged

people to do in a challenge that we're hosting on social

media. 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

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