Rewarding According to Need – Controlling Prey-Driven Dogs Around Game

What do people want from their dogs when they are out together as a team in "wild" environments? The hunting-motivated four-legged friend should offer a lot of desired behavior on their own and, moreover, be able to be prompted by their human companion. From a dog's perspective, this wish means making sacrifices, sacrifices in a dog's world where every turn offers immediate gratification and ignites hunting fever. If we now want the dog to show patience in various "wild" situations and to be able to be stopped or recalled when game is present, then these decisions must be worthwhile, where the dog's brain chooses the human world over the dog's world. On the way to decision-making, we must motivate the dog's brain, and we can achieve this through a rich, needs-based reward history: What is worthwhile will be learned!

Anja Fiedler explains,

• how to identify needs and derive the Top Twenty canine needs from them,
• how to develop needs-based rewards: active, self-rewarding, and edible,
• how and why rewards are linked to marker signals,
• how needs and motivation are related,
• why motivation must not only be built but also maintained, and
• how rewards are strategically placed in training.

Webinar Trilogy

Controlling dogs around game is not only the crowning achievement of training, it is also a difficult and complex training endeavor, as clearly emerged in the webinar "Stopping and Recalling Hunting-Motivated Dogs: Hunting Behavior in Hand" – against this theoretical background, we have divided the central aspects of training into three parts and now want to illuminate their practical implementation: rewarding, waiting, and interrupting only work together!

Note: All three webinars can be used individually. Depending on one's own training and knowledge level, it is recommended to attend all three webinars. A comprehensive explanation of the theory, which is the basis for Anja Fiedler's training, can be found in the webinar "Stopping and Recalling Hunting-Motivated Dogs: Hunting Behavior in Hand" Link to the webinar

The two other webinars:
"Learning to Wait – Controlling Hunting-Motivated Dogs Around Game" Link to the webinar
"Learning to Interrupt – Controlling Hunting-Motivated Dogs Around Game" Link to the webinar

The speaker

Anja Fiedler is the head of the "dogable – what (hunting) dogs want" dog school. With her diverse seminar program, she travels throughout Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
More about the speaker: http://www.dogable.de/node/5

Photo credit: Anna Auerbach/ Kosmos