How many hours of work have gone into that? Amazing stuff, and presumably not every dog would be capable of being trained to do that?
Most dogs are capable if being trained to an surprisingly high standard. In fact most dogs learn an amazing amount during their lifetime, it's just that they use what they learn to avoid having to do as they're told.
The trick is, making them
want to please you, and to do that, you have to understand how a dog's mind works and be able to tap into his instincts.
Most people can be taught to train their dog to a reasonable standard, but the majority never really understand why the dog is doing what he is doing.
Matt 'Evil Pie' Russell is a stark exception to this rule. When he writes or talks about dogs you can tell that he really "Gets it".
Let me give you some idea the kind of thing most dogs are capable of learning. I will use my own dog as an example. She is of average intelligence and I will describe things she has been trained to do without anyone even noticing they were training her.
When she is outside and she wants to come in, she barks a special kind of bark, it's a high pitched sound, like a cross between a bark and a yelp. This came about because one time, after sitting outside waiting for someone to open the door for hours, she became frustrated and gave a peculiar bark. One of us opened the door to investigate and hey presto, lesson learned. Now she uses that bark only for when she wants to come in or when she's been accidentally trapped in a room.
When I put my hiking boots, she knows she is going for a walk and she gets excited, but If I put on my overalls before my boots then she knows I'm going to service the car or something and she doesn't bother getting out of her basket.
If open a can, she doesn't flicker an eyelid, unless its a can of tuna that is, then she scampers into the kitchen and sits right in front of me because I always give her a few morsels. She does this as soon as I take the can from the cupboard, before I've even opened it. It must make a different sound to the other cans as I pick it up.
She does this for everyone in the family except Sadie, who never shares her tuna. When Sadie opens a can, the dog doesn't even look in her direction.
She soon learned what "Has the dog been fed?" meant, so to prevent her getting prematurely excited we changed it to
"Delled d juckel hobben?" That lasted about a week. She soon deciphered things like "Has you-know-who had you-know-what?" and "ixnae on the ogfooddae." These days we just look at each other and raise an eyebrow but she still isn't fooled.
When we all go out for the day and she can't come along, I tie her up to a kennel outside. When she sees us getting ready, gathering up car keys and mobile phones etc, she goes outside and waits by her tether. If she could attach it herself, she would.
It seems pretty clever, but she is my no means exceptional, all dogs do stuff like this. They learn by association of ideas. All you as the trainer have to do is know what is in the dogs mind, deliver correction or reward at precisely the right time, and training is a doddle.
Knowing what is in the dogs mind is the tricky part.
Example: You tell your dog to sit. He sits and licks you hand. You praise him for sitting. The next time you tell him to sit, he licks your hand and waits excitedly for your praise, you scold him for not doing as he's told, but he didn't associate the praise with sitting, he associated it with licking your hand. The next time you say "Sit" Her may well associate it with neither sitting nor licking, but with scolding.
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