With the beginning of March has come the start of our 2025 Membership group Dobermann Training & Masterclass Membership, which is our year-long group for comprehensive dog training and enrichment for your dobermanns.
Acceptance & Enrichment in Training
We launched our opening live with a well-attended presentation on how important acceptance is in our training journey. Many people have a misconception of acceptance as a state of giving up, of stagnation, where you find yourself at the end. Instead, we discussed how acceptance actually allows us to see the true state of our present location and circumstances in our training without judgement of ourselves or our dogs. It provides the opportunity to accept that there is a certain set of facts to our current position and from there enables us to use this as a springboard for action. If this is where we currently are with our dog’s training we can consider:
- How did we get here
- What have we done or not done that may have contributed to our current level
- What are realistic expectations from our dogs at this point
- Where do we go from here
These and many other questions can lead us towards forming a training plan with our dogs, one that takes into consideration both our level and our dog’s level at this time. No added judgement, just the facts as they stand.
Social media traps
We also delved into the comparison traps that can occur when we are consistently faced with the lies of perfection that exist everywhere in social media. It is so very easy to become discouraged with our own and our dog’s abilities when we compare ourselves to other dog training teams.
We must remember to look at these snippets of time through the lens of truth. We are never seeing the whole picture of that training team but instead a brief capture of a moment in time that was filmed after an unknown amount of retakes and could have been in the works for numerous weeks prior to that “perfect” capture occurring. Just like those one hour to solve your dog’s aggression TV shows, there is a lot more that goes on behind the scenes than what is edited and shown to the public.
Not that watching others for ideas and techniques isn’t helpful, but remember to do so without judging yourself as less than for your current abilities!
Enrichment & Your Dog
We also talked about the many different ways to be able to fill our dog’s lives with enrichment through:
- Scent
- Food
- Sound
- Social Activity
- Cognitive Training
We can intentionally add so much into life for our dogs, regardless of whether they are able to go on daily walks or if they are unable due to reactivity, illness or injury. It takes planning on our part, but our dogs can live a very full life.
We have also begun our 12 week challenge in Dobercademy Dobermans Training With Their Friends Facebook group and have had a lot of great videos and participation with our first weekly challenge.
How it works is there will be a post on Mondays for the skill to work on and on Friday your challenge will be posted. Participants will share their challenge videos for review. By passing all 12 of the challenges each dog/owner team will earn their Bronze Level Dobercademy Good Dog certificate! If you haven’t joined yet, come see us by clicking here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2485973378281515
Meanwhile, in our Membership group we will be working on earning our Level One Trick Dog Awards. All part of bringing cognitive enrichment to our dogs and increasing our relationship strength through the bond of training with positivity!
We would love to have you join us, so head over to join the Facebook challenge or contact us if you would like to join the membership. Together we can train through kindness, knowledge and understanding!
Headed to Crufts?? – Our very own team of Sharon and Sassi will be there too! Stop and say HI!!