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Socks has been living with us for two months now, and after he settled in, I took him to doggy school. While we were absolutely lucky in getting a dog with very few behavioural issues who’s keen to learn, he needs training. He was abandoned as a puppy and grew up in the shelter, so he never had any of the usual training. As a teacher, I don’t like badly raised kids and poorly trained dogs. I love my friends’ dogs, but seriously, they’re a nightmare trainig wise, only being manageable by either having a gentle nature (big dog) or being a prototypical small dog (no manners but easily controllable). I also would like Socks to become a school dog one day and therefore he needs a solid basis. So I’ve been taking him to doggy school for the last weeks, for general training and for recall. Right now it’s breeding season anyway, so dogs need to be on a lead, but hopefully once that’s over we’ll have a solid recall so he can have more freedom.

In recall training (and in general training), we mostly work with classic conditioning: Desired behaviour is rewarded. I’m very happy to live in a country where it’s illegal to torture your dog in the name of training with prong collars or worse electric collars. So for recall, our first job was to find out what our dogs love the most. Not only did we have to test what their favourite snacks are, but also what others things could motivate them to abandon whatever they’re doing elsewhere and to come back to us. So each team in the group came back with different answers, which got me thinking: Now, of course children are not dogs. I can’t explain to Socks why it’s important that he doesn’t just run into the street because there’s a blackbird on the other side. He’s got all the understanding of a toddler. Instead I teach him that sitting down and waiting for me the lead the way gets him a reward. But children are similar to dogs in that they’re all different and want and need different things. And unlike with my dog, I can’t sit down and analyse those things for 250 different kids. And I can’t implement them for 25 different kids in a classroom. The ressource “teacher” is spread a lot more thinly than the resource “dog owner”. But we thoght it would be fun to try and throw them a cheese cube every time they gave the correct answer…