Disney Dog Training and Contrived Controversy

Fifty-five years ago, Walt Disney filmed a movie called Big Red featuring a show-bred Irish Setter that wanted to hunt, and a contrived crisis about dog training between an older English-speaking Canadian (played by Walter Pigeon) and a younger French-speaking orphan who wanted to teach the dog using "gentler" methods.

The movie begins at a dog show at the Montreal Kennel Club where Big Red wins first prize and Walter Pigeon's "kennel man" is instructed to spend as much as $5,000 to acquire Big Red -- a cash equivalent of over $35,000 in today's dollars.

In the next scene we see the improbable situation where a show dog has been bought by a shooting dog man, and the shooting man with show dogs also has many breeds rather than specializing in just one.

We then get introduced to the orphan, dressed in beautiful clothes and dripping in pancake makeup, who slurs grade-school French.  Welcome to the wonderful world of Disney!

Finally, we learn that just one month after being acquired, Big Red is supposed to go to the Westminster Dog Show in New York where, if he wins, he will be "the best dog in North America, perhaps in the whole world" and his cash-value will then double.

As the movie rolls forward, we see the horror of aversive training techniques -- Walter Pigeon cuffs the dog under the jaw so that it will hold its head unnaturally high in the show ring.

Of course the boy is shocked -- this is abuse!

But Walter Pigeon explains, setting up the essential conflict of the movie, that "a dog is an animal, he is governed by conditioned reflexes.  Dogs are not people, they do not have human reactions, and the only way to handle them is with a firm voice and tight lead."

And with that -- all of two seconds of training done with horrible timing -- Walter Pigeon gives up on the dog for the day. "We'll try again tomorrow" he tells the kennel man.

Walter Pigeon explains to the Orphan that Big Red is a "bench dog" and that "his kind are not used for any practical purposes any more" because they were bred for looks rather than work.

This little scene is designed to reinforce our dislike of the older man, who has just said he bought a useless dog at an extravagant price solely to make money.  This is, quite obviously, the antithesis of  good red-blooded American values.  And besides, Big Red is not useless!

Welcome to Disney, where every story is a morality tale.

The movie takes obvious plot twists and turns as it progresses, with the poor Orphan Boy somehow becoming an expert trainer in less than a month (a miracle!), and the fellow with the expensive shotguns and kennel full of dogs, somehow not knowing his ass from his elbow.  And yes there is the obligatory run-in with a mountain lion, with Big Red and the Orphan Boy saving the day.

What's interesting about this story, from a historical point of view, is that it shows how long the  battle between "abusive" trainers and "gentle" trainers has been going on.

In fact, working dog men like Montague Stevens were training dogs with food long before the parents of Karen Pryor or Victoria Stilwell were born. 

Food rewards as a dog training method are older than Jesus, and it's hard to find a 19th Century book on dog training that does not talk about the practice. 

But you cannot train everything with a food reward, which is why God gave porcupines their quills, and skunks their spray.  The real world is full of consequences of all kinds, and they are not all positive, are they?

The dog trainer who was actually used in this movie is none other than William Koehler, who is often demonized as an abusive trainer simply because he did not shower his dogs with biscuits and then turn around to whine that they were now all fat. 

This is not to say that all of of William Koehler's techniques would be saluted today.  Long lines?  Yes. Tossing a light choke chain at a dog?  OK.  But Koehler also saluted the idea that with some dogs a very powerful aversive, done once, was less cruel that mincing about with half measures for months.  Was Koehler right?  The bull in the pasture that does not test his electric fence says "maybe."  But do most dog trainers really need to use strong aversives?  The answer is no.  Most dog owners are pet owners who will never see their dog running free off leash, and most are training dogs starting as puppies, before bad behaviors have been deeply ingrained because they were (unintentionally) rewarded for years.

Koehler, of course, did run his dogs off-leash and unlike so many in the world of dog training, he did not start by training fat suburban dogs owned by owners too lazy to walk them. 

Like so many dog trainers of his era, Koehler started off in the military in World War II where the dogs acquired were almost all large adults and given (read abandoned) to the military because they often already had discipline and temperament issues. And yet, in the military, a dog that does not obey a command can cost lives, both human and canine.  To this day, the U.S. military uses very strong aversives for certain parts of its training regime.  When a bomb-detecting dog is told to "stop" this is not to be taken as a suggestion!  A dog that barks while on patrol can kill an entire platoon.

Yes, most military dogs "will work for Kong" and other toys and small rewards, but these dogs have also learned  that there are certain never acts, and some of those (such as barking on patrol) may be counter to their internal code.

The year that Big Red came out, William Koehler published The Koehler Method of Dog Training which became a staple of AKC obedience competitors.

A variation of the "Koehler method" of dog training was brought to television in the late 1970s by Barbara Woodhouse, who featured basic Koehler methods in her own book, "No Bad Dogs."

Of course, most people who opine about Koehler today have never actually read a Koehler book, and have no idea that he trained dogs in Hollywood or that he trained dogs for this "anti-abuse" movie in particular.   When they do look to defame Koehler, they generally do so by quoting from the very end of one of his books -- and leaving out the fact that this section is very clearly labeled as one that is only to be consulted when all else has failed and the next stop for the dog is the gas chamber. 

Death before discomfort?  That's the rallying cry of a lot of "pure positive" dog trainers today, who are only too willing to declare a dog untrainable if they cannot get it to changes it ways with nothing more than a few cubes of cheese.

Did William Koehler believe in unearned rewards, or effusive baby talk to dogs?  No, but neither do most sensible trainers.

Did William Koehler prance about in a dominatrix outfit while showering dogs with biscuits and screaming at their owners?  No, but neither do most sensible trainers. 

William Koehler was a balanced trainer.  He knew dogs needed exercise (as can be seen in this movie), and that for a working dog there were few more powerful forces at work than the code that explodes (as can be seen when Big Red pings on birds when out in the field with the Orphan Boy). 

Koehler also knew that in the real world of off-lead dog work, a dog that obeyed only some of the time had a higher-than acceptable chance of ending up dead. 

That's still true today, whether the dog is an explosives detection dog in the Army, a police dog in Detroit, or a companion dog that escapes the yard in California.

William Koehler worked with dogs for 50 years, was employed by Walt Disney for 20 years, and over the course of his life he trained more than 25,000 dogs according to his obituary.

Compare his record with anyone else, and you are likely to find his credentials and experience without peer. 

Does that mean you have to train your dog the Koehler way?  Of course not!.  Train your dog any way you want.  But do everyone a favor, eh?  Admit that William Koehler had a long and remarkable career training very happy dogs (as did other Hollywood dog trainers, such Rudd Weatherwax, the trainer of Lassie), and that William Koehler was dealing with a lot of dogs that were not Labrador retrievers, that were not puppies, and which required a performance standard a little bit higher than "sometimes he'll do it if he feels like it and I have his toy or a chunk of cheese."

• Related Links:
  ** Harry Potter Dog Training
  ** The Secret Sauce is Commitment
  ** Going Negative as Dog Trainer Marketing Tool
  ** They Invented Animal Training
  ** The Radical Notion of Consequences
  ** Your Dogs are a Mess (and your kids are no prize)
  ** Clickerless Clicker Training
  ** Clicker Training Does Not Require Empathy
  ** The Three Parts of Operant Conditioning
  ** Dominance Creates and Maintains Wolf Packs
  ** Training the Children
  ** Cesar Millan: The Secret Is Human Training
  ** The Devolution of Dog and the Training of Man
  ** A Short History of Dog Training
  ** Are Useful Tools Ever Out of Date?
  ** Catching a Mexican Wolf With a Y Pole
  ** Are You an Old School Dog Trainer?
  ** You're Not an Abusive Dog Trainer, Are You?
  ** Dog Training Circa 1902
  ** Operant Conditioning 101 With Children
  ** Milking Stools and Operant Conditioning
  ** Extinguishing Bad Behavior
  ** Death Before Discomfort?
  ** Death from Snake Bite Before Discomfort?
  ** De-sensitizing a Dog to Stimulus
  ** Fence Fighting at the Dog Trainers Guild
  ** The Limits and Strengths of E-Collars  .

Disney Dog Training with Contrived Controversy

Fifty-five years ago, Walt Disney filmed a movie called Big Red featuring a show-bred Irish Setter that wanted to hunt, and a contrived crisis about dog training between an older English-speaking Canadian (played by Walter Pigeon) and a younger French-speaking orphan who wanted to teach the dog using "gentler" methods.

The movie begins at a dog show at the Montreal Kennel Club where Big Red wins first prize and Walter Pigeon's "kennel man" is instructed to spend as much as $5,000 to acquire Big Red -- a cash equivalent of over $35,000 in today's dollars.

In the next scene we see the improbable situation where a show dog has been bought by a shooting dog man, and the shooting man with show dogs also has many breeds rather than specializing in just one.

We then get introduced to the orphan, dressed in beautiful clothes and dripping in pancake makeup, who slurs grade-school French.  Welcome to the wonderful world of Disney!

Finally, we learn that just one month after being acquired, Big Red is supposed to go to the Westminster Dog Show in New York where, if he wins, he will be "the best dog in North America, perhaps in the whole world" and his cash-value will then double.

As the movie rolls forward, we see the horror of aversive training techniques -- Walter Pigeon cuffs the dog under the jaw so that it will hold its head unnaturally high in the show ring.

Of course the boy is shocked -- this is abuse!

But Walter Pigeon explains, setting up the essential conflict of the movie, that "a dog is an animal, he is governed by conditioned reflexes.  Dogs are not people, they do not have human reactions, and the only way to handle them is with a firm voice and tight lead."

And with that -- all of two seconds of training done with horrible timing -- Walter Pigeon gives up on the dog for the day. "We'll try again tomorrow" he tells the kennel man.

Walter Pigeon explains to the Orphan that Big Red is a "bench dog" and that "his kind are not used for any practical purposes any more" because they were bred for looks rather than work.

This little scene is designed to reinforce our dislike of the older man, who has just said he bought a useless dog at an extravagant price solely to make money.  This is, quite obviously, the antithesis of  good red-blooded American values.  And besides, Big Red is not useless!

Welcome to Disney, where every story is a morality tale.

The movie takes obvious plot twists and turns as it progresses, with the poor Orphan Boy somehow becoming an expert trainer in less than a month (a miracle!), and the fellow with the expensive shotguns and kennel full of dogs, somehow not knowing his ass from his elbow.  And yes there is the obligatory run-in with a mountain lion, with Big Red and the Orphan Boy saving the day.

What's interesting about this story, from a historical point of view, is that it shows how long the  battle between "abusive" trainers and "gentle" trainers has been going on.

In fact, working dog men like Montague Stevens were training dogs with food long before the parents of Karen Pryor or Victoria Stilwell were born. 

Food rewards as a dog training method are older than Jesus, and it's hard to find a 19th Century book on dog training that does not talk about the practice. 

But you cannot train everything with a food reward, which is why God gave porcupines their quills, and skunks their spray.  The real world is full of consequences of all kinds, and they are not all positive, are they?

The dog trainer who was actually used in this movie is none other than William Koehler, who is often demonized as an abusive trainer simply because he did not shower his dogs with biscuits and then turn around to whine that they were now all fat. 

This is not to say that all of of William Koelher's techniques would be saluted today.  Long lines?  Yes. Tossing a light choke chain at a dog?  OK.  But Koehler also saluted the idea that with some dogs a very powerful aversive, done once, was less cruel that mincing about with half measures for months.  Was Koelher right?  The bull in the pasture that does not test his electric fence says "maybe."  But do most dog trainers really need to use strong aversives?  The answer is no.  Most dog owners are pet owners who will never see their dog running free off leash, and most are training dogs starting as puppies, before bad behaviors have been deeply ingrained because they were (unintentionally) rewarded for years.

Koelher, of course, did run his dogs off-leash and unlike so many in the world of dog training, he did not start by training fat suburban dogs owned by owners too lazy to walk them. 

Like so many dog trainers of his era, Koehler started off in the military in World War II where the dogs acquired were almost all large adults and given (read abandoned) to the military because they often already had discipline and temperament issues. And yet, in the military, a dog that does not obey a command can cost lives, both human and canine.  To this day, the U.S. military uses very strong aversives for certain parts of its training regime.  When a bomb-detecting dog is told to "stop" this is not to be taken as a suggestion!  A dog that barks while on patrol can kill an entire platoon.

Yes, most military dogs "will work for Kong" and other toys and small rewards, but these dogs have also learned  that there are certain never acts, and some of those (such as barking on patrol) may be counter to their internal code.

The year that Big Red came out, William Koehler published The Koehler Method of Dog Training which became a staple of AKC obedience competitors.

A variation of the "Koehler method" of dog training was brought to television in the late 1970s by Barbara Woodhouse, who featured basic Koehler methods in her own book, "No Bad Dogs."

Of course, most people who opine about Koehler today have never actually read a Koehler book, and have no idea that he trained dogs in Hollywood or that he trained dogs for this "anti-abuse" movie in particular.   When they do look to defame Koheler, they generally do so by quoting from the very end of one of his books -- and leaving out the fact that this section is very clearly labeled as one that is only to be consulted when all else has failed and the next stop for the dog is the gas chamber. 

Death before discomfort?  That's the rallying cry of a lot of "pure positive" dog trainers today, who are only too willing to declare a dog untrainable if they cannot get it to changes it ways with nothing more than a few cubes of cheese.

Did William Koehler believe in unearned rewards, or effusive baby talk to dogs?  No, but neither do most sensible trainers.

Did William Koehler prance about in a dominatrix outfit while showering dogs with biscuits and screaming at their owners?  No, but neither do most sensible trainers. 

William Koehler was a balanced trainer.  He knew dogs needed exercise (as can be seen in this movie), and that for a working dog there were few more powerful forces at work than the code that explodes (as can be seen when Big Red pings on birds when out in the field with the Orphan Boy). 

Koehler also knew that in the real world of off-lead dog work, a dog that obeyed only some of the time had a higher-than acceptable chance of ending up dead. 

That's still true today, whether the dog is an explosives detection dog in the Army, a police dog in Detroit, or a companion dog that escapes the yard in California.

William Koehler worked with dogs for 50 years, was employed by Walt Disney for 20 years, and over the course of his life he trained more than 25,000 dogs according to his obituary.

Compare his record with anyone else, and you are likely to find his credentials and experience without peer. 

Does that mean you have to train your dog the Koelher way?  Of course not!.  Train your dog any way you want.  But do everyone a favor, eh?  Admit that William Koehler had a long and remarkable career training very happy dogs (as did other Hollywood dog trainers, such Rudd Weatherwax, the trainer of Lassie), and that William Koehler was dealing with a lot of dogs that were not Labrador retrievers, that were not puppies, and which required a performance standard a little bit higher than "sometimes he'll do it if he feels like it and I have his toy or a chunk of cheese."

• Related Links:
  ** Harry Potter Dog Training
  ** The Secret Sauce is Commitment
  ** Going Negative as Dog Trainer Marketing Tool
  ** They Invented Animal Training
  ** The Radical Notion of Consequences
  ** Your Dogs are a Mess (and your kids are no prize)
  ** Clickerless Clicker Training
  ** Clicker Training Does Not Require Empathy
  ** The Three Parts of Operant Conditioning
  ** Dominance Creates and Maintains Wolf Packs
  ** Training the Children
  ** Cesar Millan: The Secret Is Human Training
  ** The Devolution of Dog and the Training of Man
  ** A Short History of Dog Training
  ** Are Useful Tools Ever Out of Date?
  ** Catching a Mexican Wolf With a Y Pole
  ** Are You an Old School Dog Trainer?
  ** You're Not an Abusive Dog Trainer, Are You?
  ** Dog Training Circa 1902
  ** Operant Conditioning 101 With Children
  ** Milking Stools and Operant Conditioning
  ** Extinguishing Bad Behavior
  ** Death Before Discomfort?
  ** Death from Snake Bite Before Discomfort?
  ** De-sensitizing a Dog to Stimulus
  ** Fence Fighting at the Dog Trainers Guild
  ** The Limits and Strengths of E-Collars  .

No, You May Not Pet My Dog

Earlier this month, in the comments section to this post, I wrote:

"My favorite people are the ones with little tottering kids who think Jack Russells are like Toy Poodles or Maltese, and who act shocked when I say it's NOT okay for their barely walking kids to pet my dogs.

"Jack Russells are not good with very small children," I explain. "They have a habit of removing the front lip of children that squeal and jerk when they move."

And it's not a lie. A working Russell has to have brains and discretion, and most of the time it's all fine, but working terriers also have "the code that explodes" within them, and when that happens they are true terriers. Bottom line: they are not a dog for everyone.

"Is he he good with cats," I am asked. "Oh yes," I reply, "he loves them. What flavor is yours?" And no, that is NOT a joke.

Now comes the horrible news that a Jack Russell Terrier in Kentucky has killed a 6-week old baby that was left unattended in the middle of the bed with the dog in the same room.

A rare thing? Of course. That said, it is not a thing that defies the laws of nature, is it?

The folks who look at dog bite fatalities will tell you that Jack Russells do not normally bite people to death.

True enough, but only because of their relatively small size.

In fact, terriers bite folks quite a lot, and Jack Russells may be near the top of the biting list for the simple reason that they are fairly common, and have strong prey instincts.

Of course there will always be people who will tell you that their Collies have no drive to herd, their Pit Bulls have no drive to fight, their Cattle Dogs have no urge to nip, their Rottweilers have no urge to protect, and their Terriers have no secret urge to wreck carnage on pet store rodents and small birds.

Fine. Believe if you want. But do me a favor, eh? Keep an eye on the very small children. And don't leave the baby alone with the dog.

Yes, your kids are more likely to be killed by a swarm of bees than by a dog bite. That said, use common sense and be carefull.

A dog that bites does not violate any laws of nature. And, as uncomfortable as it may make some breed defenders, biting is very much in the nature of all dogs, and some breeds in particular. A Jack Russell is one of them.

I have said so in the past, and I say so again: Caveat emptor.
.

H Is for Hawk, and H is for Hedge

Remember when we were told that, along with a paperless office, the machine age would deliver us a flying car and endless amounts of leisure time?

Right.  Not so much.

And so, after buying a paper copy of H is for Hawk, and carrying it around in my bag for six weeks, I made a leap and bought an audio copy on Audible as part of a promotion of that service.

The fact that it was going to be read by the author was an attraction.

An earlier Audible book on artificial intelligence had been read by a voice that sounded a bit like the computer "Hal" from 2001, A Space Odyssey.

Would this be that voice too?

I suspected not.

I am happy to report Helen MacDonald has a delightful voice, and her cadence is perfect.

She is wonderful writer, but she may be even better listened to than read. This is writing as poetry.

I had read T.H. White's The Goshawk before. I even own a first edition (there is no other) of Gone to Ground, his sporting decameron tale, but I had no idea White was gay or a sadist.

All I could tell from reading The Goshawk was that he didn't know his ass from his elbow when it came to training any animal, much less a hawk.

As I listened to Helen MacDonald's recounting of her story, her father's story, and T.H. White's, I was reminded of how much terrier work is like hawking

The frame is the same; one species harnessed by another to hunt a third.

For both, the danger of losing a much-loved animal is always there, as is the need to focus unblinking attention on the thing that is loved.

Fly a hawk, or run a working terrier in the field, and you will eventually have one disappear on you.

It happens to everyone. Most of the time things get sorted quickly enough.  But not always. 

When a hawk or a terrier slips away unseen, the hollow inside you starts as small as a peanut.  In 15 minutes it is as big as a ping pong ball. In half an hour it's as big as a melon. In an hour it is pressing hard against your lungs.

The brain tries to reign things in, but the hollow inside you has now grow, graduated, and is an independent thinker.

You strain for a sound.  Was that a goose? A murder of crows? Perhaps a barking dog?

You are hunting as if a life depends on it.  You move upwind and down, scanning for movement. You curse passing airplanes and the rumble of distant cars.  Then you hear a small muffled sound, or see a flash of fur or feather, and your world swings back, centered and in control.

There it is. All is not lost.

I can fix this.

The illusion of control is restored.

Why do we do this?  

Why do we hunt with hawk or terrier when the potential for devastating loss is always there?

I cannot speak for others. I can barely articulate an answer for myself. 

The way I hunt allows me to enter forest and field with a new set of glasses.  I see more and I begin to understand the world better because I am thinking with a primitive and feral brain that is not my own.

The way I hunt allows me to understand the natural world in a more intimate way -- and with it my own place in a complicated matrix.

In this world there is no past or future, there is only NOW. What is flying NOW? What can be scented NOW? What is the weather NOW?

I may be hunting a small farm on the edge of the suburbs, but I can see the wild, feel the wilder, and almost taste the wilderness.

And what I am doing is not without risk.

I am running along the edge of the abyss and I am aware of it. Yes, the dog or the hawk is wearing an electronic locator, but it is far from magic. Very bad things can happen out here. There is no question about that.

What is going on here is irrational, but it is also basic and elemental.

When the dogs and I go hunting, the code explodes from where it has been coiled up like a watch spring inside our respective bits of DNA.

It is an ancient code written in blood and sweat, and urine and dirt.

This code connects all things, including the dogs and I and the natural world around us.

And it is a timeless code. There is no past or future in the hedge; there is only NOW, now, now.

Perhaps this is part of the attraction. 

Perhaps this is why Helen MacDonald took to training a Goshawk as she struggled to remain upright following the death of her father.

Perhaps this is why T.H, White took to training a Goshawk when he came to his own fork in the road.

I do not know.  

I do not claim to understand it.

All I know is that a kind of enlightenment occurs for dog, hawk, and human alike. When things go well, we become one together, and with the land, and with the seconds and minutes that we spend together.

It is a perfect thing.  It is what we chase in the hedge.

The Breed Name? DEAD DOG.

The dog pictured is what breed?

And the answer is .... abandoned, dead, and virtually unadoptable at the shelter.

Dead, dead, dead.

Why?

Because the dog was bought as a puppy and was dumped when it proved to be too much.

How often does this happen for the dogs once lumped together as “bullenbeissers”?

All the time.

In the real world a Bullenbeisser is a bullenbeisser.

It funny to me to hear people wave pieces of paper with breed names on them.

It’s like saying a Patterdale, a Border Terrier, a Fell Terrier, a Jack Russell, a Parson Russell Terrier, and a Lakeland are different breeds with different histories, purposes, and codes within.

Nope.

When the code explodes, it turns out they kill cats and chickens just the same.

They bark just the same.

They dig just the same.

Is a show Border terrier likely to be a little less crazy than a working Russell?

Maybe.

But I’ve had both, and when the code explodes, most people are not ready.

Size up the dog 40 to 60 pounds and it’s Abandonment City.

That’s the bullenbeisser story.

Dogs types are dog types.

There’s a code in certain types.

Breeds are just points on the crayon.

I salute types because I salute the code within those types.

You say you have a PETbull and not a PITbull?

Cool. Awesome.

But let’s acknowledge it’s gonna be a really shitty bird dog.

Codes do not always present. They may not be there.

As a general rule, however, ash is a clear wood and knotty pine is not.

By the same token, Bullenbeisser is likely to be bullenbeisser.

You can see what that statement means by looking at the abandoned and killed dogs at any shelter.

It’s clever to toss dog breed names around, but it’s not smart.

It’s evasion.

The bottom line is if you’re not ready for a game bred molosser, don’t get any form of bullenbeisser, because they don’t deserve to be abandoned to a “shelter” to be killed because you thought Rotties or Boxers were different than Pit bulls.

And you don’t want a dog that barks, and that is dedicated to killing your son’s pet hamster or the neighbor’s cat?

Might I suggest that none of the terrier breeds, named above, are likely right for you.

Terriers gonna be terrier; bullenbeisser gonna be bullenbeisser.

And both types are way over-represented down at your local kill shelter.

The Challenge of Prey Drive

Is your dog hell-bent on killing the Easter Bunny?

Would you like to be able to walk your dog off-leash through forest and farm, confident it will stay with you and not run off chasing deer and squirrels?

It's possible, but it takes work.

I hunt groundhog, raccoons, possums, and fox with working terriers, but I also walk my dogs off-leash through local parks without any concern that they will run off to chase wildlife.

What's the secret?

There are several, but let's start with a simple idea: not all breeds of dogs (or all dogs) are the same.

Some dogs are simply not interested in chasing squirrels, rabbits, cats, or deer.

A low-drive Labrador Retriever may walk by its owner's side as a matter of course. For this dog, there may be no greater reward.

But a Jack Russell or a Border Terrier? These are some of the most famously prey-driven dogs in the world.

How hard is it to curb the prey drive of a working terrier?

Consider that Karen Pryor, a famous dog trainer and popularizer of clicker training, never did manage to train her own Border Terrier so she could walk it off-leash through the woods.

Why was Ms. Pryor not able to walk her Border Terrier off-leash in the woods?

It was a combination of two things: a very high-prey drive dog that was deeply coded to hunt, and a training regime which was inadequate to curb powerful self-rewarding behaviors.

Let's talk about internal drives and self-rewarding behaviors for a minute.

Not all dogs are the same, and every breed and every individual dog comes with a different type and level of internal code.

Everyone knows that the typical setter or pointer is naturally "birdy".

When a good bird dog scents its first quail, pheasant, or pigeon, the "code explodes" deep inside the dog. Training a bird dog is about channeling and encouraging that code, not creating it whole cloth.

The same is true for the Border Collie that naturally herds ducks, sheep, or even small children. The code is there; directing it, channeling it, and turning it off when it is not wanted is the challenge.

Training a dog to do something is a matter of rewards. If the task to be trained is evolutionarily "uncoded" inside the dog, such as presenting a paw, running weave poles, or lying down on command, food treats and verbal praise alone may be all that is needed to achieve success.

But what if what if you want the dog to NOT do something?

And what if that thing is a deeply coded, and self-rewarding, behavior?

Ah, there's the rub!

This is where rewards-based clicker training alone typically fails.

The originators of clicker training knew the limits of their methods.

Though there was a lot of money to be made in dog training, both B.F. Skinner and his immediate disciples, Keller and Marian Breland, stayed away from training dogs outdoors because they could not get reliable performance from predators in an open-field situation.

Instead, these esteemed trainers focused almost entirely on non-predators such as chickens, pigeons, rats, goats, and pigs. Even here the animals were almost always confined to boxes and cages in order to remove outside stimulus and distractions.

So, to get back to it, how do you train a hard-wired dog with a lot of prey drive to not chase rabbits and squirrels?

Start by training your dog to lie down on command, and to stay down for lengthy periods of time. This is called the "place" command, and I strongly recommend teaching it on an elevated dog cot.

Dog cots are so ubiquitous to good training they are sold as an "Amazon Basic" online.

While you are ordering your dog cot, you may also want to order a few other basic dog training tools if you do not already own them: a nylon treat-bag that you can attach to your belt, a 10- or 12-foot flat leash, and a 25-foot retractable-tape leash.

To teach "place," attach your calm dog to a leash and use food and leash pressure to get the dog up and standing on the cot. This can be done either indoors, or out in the yard. Use a single-word command, such as "bench". You can use a clicker to train this behavior, but it is not necessary.

Once the dog is up on the cot, walk around the dog on the cot while holding the leash, rewarding the dog with a small bit of food for staying on the cot, but fading off the food to a simple "good" verbal cue as soon as possible.

When the dog is loading on and off the cot with ease, and staying on the cot as you walk around it, move the dog to "down" on the cot and on command. You may need to hand place the dog in a down position initially, or you can lure the dog in a down position with food and leash pressure. Tell the dog to "stay" with a flat hand signal, and walk around the leashed dog on the cot as before, rewarding with a small bit of food and praise, as seems appropriate, but fading off as quickly as possible to a simple "good" cue for correct behavior.

You are now going to do exactly what you have been doing with the short leash, but at a longer distance, and outside, using a 25-foot retractable leash.

While retractable leashes are not recommended for normal dog walking, they are a terrific replacement for the traditional "long line" used in training.

Train your dog to "bench," down-stay and "come" several times a day, for 10-15 minutes a day, using the cot and long-line retractable leash.

Train your dog before you feed it, as you want a highly food-motivated dog for training purposes. Try to make your dog work for every scrap of food it gets, fading off consistent food rewards and replacing them with a positive verbal signal ("good"), and with occasional food "jackpots" for particularly long down-stays or quick recalls.

Intermittent and "jackpot" rewards build interest and enthusiasm in a way that consistent rewards do not.

Now that your dog has learned "bench" and "down-stay" and "come" thanks to your work on a cot and a retractable lone-line, it's time to take this show outside, and to a not-too-busy local park.

Attach the dog to a 10- or 12-foot leash and practice asking the dog to "bench" up on park benches, low walls, fallen logs, boulders, or any other low surface that looks like it will work.

Your goal here is simply to get the dog to generalize what it has learned on the cot to other locations and situations. Dogs are not good generalizers, and so you can expect some regression. Practice, practice, practice, however, and your dog will soon understand that the same "bench" and "down-stay" command that resulted in a food reward on the cot in your backyard means the same thing -- and the same rewards -- when it's done on a park bench, log, or rock in an entirely different location.

Once the dog is "benching" and doing "down-stays" on command at the park on a 10- or 12-foot leash, attached the longer retractable leash and repeat, repeat, repeat.

Once your dog is nailing "bench," long down-stays, and long-leash recalls at your favorite park, change your practice area and get the dog doing long down-stays on grass, concrete, asphalt, and dirt at different parks and in odd locations.

Once again you are teaching your dog to generalize, and once again expect a little regression, as dogs are not great generalizers.

At the end of every long down-stay, call the dog to you for a small food reward, and then keep the dog at a pretty tight heel as you walk to a new location in which to practice.

I always encourage folks do do "crazy eight" drills when walking their dogs in order to get the dog to pay attention to every stride. Changing direction without notice gives the dog a natural leash correction while making it focus on your every foot movement.

What's been going on during this period of training?

Two things: you are learning to focus on your dog, and your dog is learning to focus on you. This is important, and is the essence of all dog training.

Humans and dogs have a great natural affinity for each other because we are so very much alike. We are social pack predators and scavengers, organized in loose hierarchies, and we both have epic levels of attention deficit disorder.

Attention deficit disorder is actually more of a feature of dogs and people than a disorder.

In order to eat, and not be eaten, dogs and humans evolved to take in tremendous amounts of sensory information: sound, touch, smell, and movement.

Most of this information is not very useful, and is dumped by our brains before we even notice it.

Every once in a while, however, something evolutionarily important comes into our field of vision, and then we focus on it, and obsess about it.

Dogs and humans are very much alike in this respect, with both our brains ping-ponging back and forth between bouts of attention deficit disorder and bouts of obsessive compulsive behavior.

What's this have to do with dog training?

Quite a lot.

You see, up to now we have been using leashes, cots, and rewards to get both you and the dog focused on the fact that you are both learning a new thing.

Getting the dog up on a cot is a new thing for both you and the dog. Using an elevated cot helps focus both of you on the fact that this is "training time" and that only a very few distinct things are being trained. This is not "business as usual" between the two of you, as the cot has never been seen before, and is only being used for this one thing.

As for the leash, it provides a boundary limit for both you and the dog, but it's also a communication tool that flows in both directions and gets both of you focusing on each other.

In short, the cot, the leash, and the treat bag are all about focus, focus, focus, and it's not just the dog that needs the help!

At this point in your training, you should have a dog that walks calmly on leash, that "benches" on objects on command, and which holds a "down stay" on command for at least 10-minutes based on a hand signal alone.

Not only is your dog doing this in your living room, it is also doing this in your backyard, at your favorite park, and in strange locations where it has never been before and where there are some mild distractions, such as leashed dogs and people walking by.

Excellent!

Now you are ready to move the dog to off-leash training.

As before however, you are going to take one step backwards before you take two steps forward, and so you are going back to your fenced yard in order to learn proofing.

What is proofing?

Proofing is the difference between giving your dog a suggestion and giving your dog a commandment.

Up to now, because your dog has been on a leash, no serious harm has been done on those occasions when your dog has blown you off or ignored your initial command.

That's not true, however, if the dog is off leash. Very bad things can happen very quickly when a dog is off-leash.

People will often say their dog has excellent recall and always stays with them. Right. But will they walk that dog off-leash on a highway median strip with cars whizzing by on both sides?

Ask the question, and suddenly you get a caveat; their dog "mostly" obeys.

Right. But when working a dog off-leash, "mostly" may not be good enough. Too many bad things can happen too fast.

So how do you turn what you have been teaching your dog from mere "suggestion" to hard commandment?

Simple: punishment.

Punishment is one of those "hot" words that tends to get folks animated even before they even know what it means.

Would you punish your mother or child the same as your dog, they will ask?

Actually, yes.

Both my 85-year old mother and my kids have been "punished" with the same tools I use on my dogs, and neither one of them could even feel the correction!

Here's what folks are missing: once you have trained a dog to understand what you are asking of it, all the "punishment" that is needed, in most cases, is a gentle "tap on the shoulder" to break through the dog's natural tendency to slide between attention deficit disorder and obsessive compulsive behavior.

The good news is that at this stage of the game your dogs knows what to do.

Your dog knows how to walk on heel when on leash, and to pay pay attention to your stride.

Your dog knows to "bench" up on things when instructed, and how to hold a long-down stay on command.

And, of course, your dog knows what "come" means, because you have taught that at the end of every long "down-stay" using your retractable leash.

But will any of that matter when your dog is taken off-leash?

Maybe for a short while.

But dogs are quick forgetters, same as humans. We both suffer from epic levels of attention deficit disorder, and epic levels of obsessive compulsive behavior. Our minds are all over the place right up to that moment when we fixate and become tunnel-visioned.

How does this manifest itself in the real world? Simple: you will be walking along with your head in the clouds, and your off-leash dog will be walking a little too far ahead of you with his head in the clouds.  Because you are both off-leash, there is no longer a fixed distance limit between the two of you, and there is also no two-way communication up and down the leash.

In such a scenario, if a rabbit happens to dart out of high grass, your dog's prey drive may kick in, and it's "off to the races" through thicket and field.

This exact scenario has been the bugaboo of dog trainers for a very long time. Rudd Weatherwax , the trainer of Lassie, could never get Pal, the high prey-drive Collie and star of the TV show, to stop chasing motorcycles.

The good news is that Rudd Weathwax was training dogs more than 60 years ago, and a new tool has come along that makes a world of difference: the modern e-collar.

To be clear, the modern e-collar is not the same as the cheap, hot, and quite unreliable e-collars being sold on Ebay or Amazon for $30-$50.

These things are 30-year old off-patent technology that is too often incompetently constructed.  Stay away from this cheap out-of-date technology like the plague.

What you want is a modern e-collar made by E-Collar Technologies or Dogtra. These collars have up to 100 levels of stimulation, send signals for a half mile or more, and cost about $200 each. In my opinion these collars are worth every dime, and I would accept no substitute

If you will not fork out $200 for a modern and reliable e-collar, my advice is to keep your dog on-leash and be done with it.

That said, if you are serious about training a high prey-drive dog to walk off-leash in field and forest without it chasing rabbits, deer, squirrels, cats, and other dogs, you will find a modern e-collar as revolutionary as a cell phone or an airplane.

My own two working terriers weigh just 9 and 12 pounds, and they were trained off-lead on an E-Collar Technologies Mini-Educator whose dial setting has never moved higher than 8.

The same e-collar, albeit perhaps set at a different level, will train a 130-pound Rottweiler or Irish Wolf Hound.

For reference, I have never met a human that can feel my collars at level 8. Most folks only begin to feel a very light tingle ("Is that all there is," they ask?) between levels 10 and 12.

What does a modern e-collar do? How's it work?

Simple: It's a radio transmitter that sends a low-level electrical tap, not a zap, to the dog's collar.

This tap works to break through the attention-deficit and obsessive-compulsive behavior that so often plagues the minds of dogs.

Using an e-collar is not mean-spirited stuff.

In fact, a tap from an e-collar is analogous to reaching out to touch someone on the tip of their nose when they are not paying attention or are dead-focused on watching a movie. The touch does not hurt, but it certainly breaks into their train of thought, and gets them focused on what you are saying!

And so it is with the modern e-collar.

The e-collar is not designed to train, but to proof. Proofing is mostly about getting a dog to focus and not brain-wander or brain-obsess.

Do modern e-collars also have a "boost" function to send a more powerful NO signal if that is needed?

They do.

My own working terriers have their "boost" set at 12 (out of 100), which is an electronic tap so low that a human can barely feel it. It feels lighter than a fly landing on your hand, but it's enough to stop my dogs dead because they have been trained.

Bigger and thicker-headed dogs might need a higher setting, but modern e-collars are about signaling and training dogs, not about hot shocks to "bust" an entirely untrained and out-of-control dog off a deer, fox, rabbit, or cat.

This is modern dog training technology, not the older "buster" technology of the 1970s and 80s.

Modern e-collars have several options to send different kinds of signals to a dog: a tapping stimulation, a vibration mode, and a tone.

People new to e-collars imagine that the vibration mode, which is similar in sensation to what a cell phone does, must be the "gentlest" way to signal a dog, but in fact most dogs actually prefer a low-level electrical "tap". In fact, with my own dogs, the only evidence that a signal has been sent at all is a change in what they are actually doing. If my dogs are too far out, and I tap once, and they know to come back immediately. If they get up and come off a one-hour down stay while I binge watch TV, a single tap will remind them that they have not yet been released, and they will circle back to lie down on their cot.

Because e-collars offer the prospect of perfect timing at a distance, simple voice commands and corrective taps quickly become paired. In short order, you will find you have gone weeks without tapping the collar even once.

This is what e-collars bring to the table: reliable proofing at a distance.

E-collar training and proofing is not hard or complicated. The main point is to start training your dog the old fashioned way first, with leash, flat collar, and treats. Once your dog knows the basic commands, you can begin "proofing" the commands using a low-level "tapping" stimulation.

Dog trainer Larry Krohn has a good, short instruction manual on the basics of e-collar settings and techniques which is available off of Amazon, and I would order that low-cost practical guide when you order your modern e-collar.

As with all dog training, e-collar proofing is a process not an event. Just as every dog comes with a different level of drive, intelligence and bidability, so too will every dog come with a different "working level" for e-collar training.

Start low, and on leash, and slowly move up. The goal is a tap, not a zap. The primary function of the modern e-collar is to send a well-timed and mild signal at a distance in order to break through the natural ADD and OCD of the dog. Only under very rare circumstances should you ever need to send a stronger "zap" to stop a behavior, and even then the zap should be quite mild -- no more than what you would readily give yourself.

A final note: there are many kinds of dog trainers, but far too many have no idea how to stop an unwanted and strongly coded self-reinforcing behavior.

If you come across a dog trainer who has no idea how to get a small terrier to quickly stop barking, my advice is to find another, more competent, trainer. Money is too expensive to waste on a dollar-per-hour charlatan.

By the same token, if someone presents themselves as a dog trainer, but does not own the full panoply of tools needed to train a wide range of dogs with a wide variety of problems, I would hold on to your wallet. Whether a dog trainer trains with a prong collar or not, every competent dog trainer should own several, if for no other reason than to have actually learned how they work and why they might be the right tool to use for the 105-pound women with a shoulder injury who needs to walk her Rottweiler.

The same can be said for head halters, and modern e-collars.

Every tool has its place, and even if a dog trainer does not typically use a modern e-collar in their training regime, if they do not own one and know how to use it, they should not be charging for their dog training services.

The bottom line is that you can train your dog to walk off-leash in field and forest without any harm coming to rabbit, fox, deer, squirrels, or feral cats that you may come across.

Is this is a quick thing to teach a game-bred dog that is brimming over with prey drive?

No, but it is certainly within the capabilities of any dog and dog owner, and it's a real game changer if you like to hike and hunt through field and forest.

Stopping Your Dog From Chasing the Easter Bunny

Is your dog hell-bent on killing the Easter Bunny?

Would you like to be able to walk your dog off-leash through forest and farm, confident it will stay with you and not run off chasing deer and squirrels?

It's possible, but it takes work.

I hunt groundhog, raccoons, possums, and fox with working terriers, but I also walk my dogs off-leash through local parks without any concern that they will run off to chase wildlife.

What's the secret?

There are several, but let's start with a simple idea: not all breeds of dogs (or all dogs) are the same.

Some dogs are simply not interested in chasing squirrels, rabbits, cats, or deer.

A low-drive Labrador Retriever may walk by its owner's side as a matter of course. For this dog, there may be no greater reward.

But a Jack Russell or a Border Terrier? These are some of the most famously prey-driven dogs in the world.

How hard is it to curb the prey drive of a working terrier?

Consider that Karen Pryor, a famous dog trainer and popularizer of clicker training, never did manage to train her own Border Terrier so she could walk it off-leash through the woods.

Why was Ms. Pryor not able to walk her Border Terrier off-leash in the woods?

It was a combination of two things: a very high-prey drive dog that was deeply coded to hunt, and a training regime which was inadequate to curb powerful self-rewarding behaviors.

Let's talk about internal drives and self-rewarding behaviors for a minute.

Not all dogs are the same, and every breed and every individual dog comes with a different type and level of internal code.

Everyone knows that the typical setter or pointer is naturally "birdy".

When a good bird dog scents its first quail, pheasant, or pigeon, the "code explodes" deep inside the dog. Training a bird dog is about channeling and encouraging that code, not creating it whole cloth.

The same is true for the Border Collie that naturally herds ducks, sheep, or even small children. The code is there; directing it, channeling it, and turning it off when it is not wanted is the challenge.

Training a dog to do something is a matter of rewards. If the task to be trained is evolutionarily "uncoded" inside the dog, such as presenting a paw, running weave poles, or lying down on command, food treats and verbal praise alone may be all that is needed to achieve success.

But what if what if you want the dog to NOT do something?

And what if that thing is a deeply coded, and self-rewarding, behavior?

Ah, there's the rub!

This is where rewards-based clicker training alone typically fails.

The originators of clicker training knew the limits of their methods.

Though there was a lot of money to be made in dog training, both B.F. Skinner and his immediate disciples, Keller and Marian Breland, stayed away from training dogs outdoors because they could not get reliable performance from predators in an open-field situation.

Instead, these esteemed trainers focused almost entirely on non-predators such as chickens, pigeons, rats, goats, and pigs. Even here the animals were almost always confined to boxes and cages in order to remove outside stimulus and distractions.

So, to get back to it, how do you train a hard-wired dog with a lot of prey drive to not chase rabbits and squirrels?

Start by training your dog to lie down on command, and to stay down for lengthy periods of time. This is called the "place" command, and I strongly recommend teaching it on an elevated dog cot.

Dog cots are so ubiquitous to good training they are sold as an "Amazon Basic" online.

While you are ordering your dog cot, you may also want to order a few other basic dog training tools if you do not already own them: a nylon treat-bag that you can attach to your belt, a 10- or 12-foot flat leash, and a 25-foot retractable-tape leash.

To teach "place," attach your calm dog to a leash and use food and leash pressure to get the dog up and standing on the cot. This can be done either indoors, or out in the yard. Use a single-word command, such as "bench". You can use a clicker to train this behavior, but it is not necessary.

Once the dog is up on the cot, walk around the dog on the cot while holding the leash, rewarding the dog with a small bit of food for staying on the cot, but fading off the food to a simple "good" verbal cue as soon as possible.

When the dog is loading on and off the cot with ease, and staying on the cot as you walk around it, move the dog to "down" on the cot and on command. You may need to hand place the dog in a down position initially, or you can lure the dog in a down position with food and leash pressure. Tell the dog to "stay" with a flat hand signal, and walk around the leashed dog on the cot as before, rewarding with a small bit of food and praise, as seems appropriate, but fading off as quickly as possible to a simple "good" cue for correct behavior.

You are now going to do exactly what you have been doing with the short leash, but at a longer distance, and outside, using a 25-foot retractable leash.

While retractable leashes are not recommended for normal dog walking, they are a terrific replacement for the traditional "long line" used in training.

Train your dog to "bench," down-stay and "come" several times a day, for 10-15 minutes a day, using the cot and long-line retractable leash.

Train your dog before you feed it, as you want a highly food-motivated dog for training purposes. Try to make your dog work for every scrap of food it gets, fading off consistent food rewards and replacing them with a positive verbal signal ("good"), and with occasional food "jackpots" for particularly long down-stays or quick recalls.

Intermittent and "jackpot" rewards build interest and enthusiasm in a way that consistent rewards do not.

Now that your dog has learned "bench" and "down-stay" and "come" thanks to your work on a cot and a retractable lone-line, it's time to take this show outside, and to a not-too-busy local park.

Attach the dog to a 10- or 12-foot leash and practice asking the dog to "bench" up on park benches, low walls, fallen logs, boulders, or any other low surface that looks like it will work.

Your goal here is simply to get the dog to generalize what it has learned on the cot to other locations and situations. Dogs are not good generalizers, and so you can expect some regression. Practice, practice, practice, however, and your dog will soon understand that the same "bench" and "down-stay" command that resulted in a food reward on the cot in your backyard means the same thing -- and the same rewards -- when it's done on a park bench, log, or rock in an entirely different location.

Once the dog is "benching" and doing "down-stays" on command at the park on a 10- or 12-foot leash, attached the longer retractable leash and repeat, repeat, repeat.

Once your dog is nailing "bench," long down-stays, and long-leash recalls at your favorite park, change your practice area and get the dog doing long down-stays on grass, concrete, asphalt, and dirt at different parks and in odd locations.

Once again you are teaching your dog to generalize, and once again expect a little regression, as dogs are not great generalizers.

At the end of every long down-stay, call the dog to you for a small food reward, and then keep the dog at a pretty tight heel as you walk to a new location in which to practice.

I always encourage folks do do "crazy eight" drills when walking their dogs in order to get the dog to pay attention to every stride. Changing direction without notice gives the dog a natural leash correction while making it focus on your every foot movement.

What's been going on during this period of training?

Two things: you are learning to focus on your dog, and your dog is learning to focus on you. This is important, and is the essence of all dog training.

Humans and dogs have a great natural affinity for each other because we are so very much alike. We are social pack predators and scavengers, organized in loose hierarchies, and we both have epic levels of attention deficit disorder.

Attention deficit disorder is actually more of a feature of dogs and people than a disorder.

In order to eat, and not be eaten, dogs and humans evolved to take in tremendous amounts of sensory information: sound, touch, smell, and movement.

Most of this information is not very useful, and is dumped by our brains before we even notice it.

Every once in a while, however, something evolutionarily important comes into our field of vision, and then we focus on it, and obsess about it.

Dogs and humans are very much alike in this respect, with both our brains ping-ponging back and forth between bouts of attention deficit disorder and bouts of obsessive compulsive behavior.

What's this have to do with dog training?

Quite a lot.

You see, up to now we have been using leashes, cots, and rewards to get both you and the dog focused on the fact that you are both learning a new thing.

Getting the dog up on a cot is a new thing for both you and the dog. Using an elevated cot helps focus both of you on the fact that this is "training time" and that only a very few distinct things are being trained. This is not "business as usual" between the two of you, as the cot has never been seen before, and is only being used for this one thing.

As for the leash, it provides a boundary limit for both you and the dog, but it's also a communication tool that flows in both directions and gets both of you focusing on each other.

In short, the cot, the leash, and the treat bag are all about focus, focus, focus, and it's not just the dog that needs the help!

At this point in your training, you should have a dog that walks calmly on leash, that "benches" on objects on command, and which holds a "down stay" on command for at least 10-minutes based on a hand signal alone.

Not only is your dog doing this in your living room, it is also doing this in your backyard, at your favorite park, and in strange locations where it has never been before and where there are some mild distractions, such as leashed dogs and people walking by.

Excellent!

Now you are ready to move the dog to off-leash training.

As before however, you are going to take one step backwards before you take two steps forward, and so you are going back to your fenced yard in order to learn proofing.

What is proofing?

Proofing is the difference between giving your dog a suggestion and giving your dog a commandment.

Up to now, because your dog has been on a leash, no serious harm has been done on those occasions when your dog has blown you off or ignored your initial command.

That's not true, however, if the dog is off leash. Very bad things can happen very quickly when a dog is off-leash.

People will often say their dog has excellent recall and always stays with them. Right. But will they walk that dog off-leash on a highway median strip with cars whizzing by on both sides?

Ask the question, and suddenly you get a caveat; their dog "mostly" obeys.

Right. But when working a dog off-leash, "mostly" may not be good enough. Too many bad things can happen too fast.

So how do you turn what you have been teaching your dog from mere "suggestion" to hard commandment?

Simple: punishment.

Punishment is one of those "hot" words that tends to get folks animated even before they even know what it means.

Would you punish your mother or child the same as your dog, they will ask?

Actually, yes.

Both my 85-year old mother and my kids have been "punished" with the same tools I use on my dogs, and neither one of them could even feel the correction!

Here's what folks are missing: once you have trained a dog to understand what you are asking of it, all the "punishment" that is needed, in most cases, is a gentle "tap on the shoulder" to break through the dog's natural tendency to slide between attention deficit disorder and obsessive compulsive behavior.

The good news is that at this stage of the game your dogs knows what to do.

Your dog knows how to walk on heel when on leash, and to pay pay attention to your stride.

Your dog knows to "bench" up on things when instructed, and how to hold a long-down stay on command.

And, of course, your dog knows what "come" means, because you have taught that at the end of every long "down-stay" using your retractable leash.

But will any of that matter when your dog is taken off-leash?

Maybe for a short while.

But dogs are quick forgetters, same as humans. We both suffer from epic levels of attention deficit disorder, and epic levels of obsessive compulsive behavior. Our minds are all over the place right up to that moment when we fixate and become tunnel-visioned.

How does this manifest itself in the real world? Simple: you will be walking along with your head in the clouds, and your off-leash dog will be walking a little too far ahead of you with his head in the clouds.  Because you are both off-leash, there is no longer a fixed distance limit between the two of you, and there is also no two-way communication up and down the leash.

In such a scenario, if a rabbit happens to dart out of high grass, your dog's prey drive may kick in, and it's "off to the races" through thicket and field.

This exact scenario has been the bugaboo of dog trainers for a very long time. Rudd Weatherwax , the trainer of Lassie, could never get Pal, the high prey-drive Collie and star of the TV show, to stop chasing motorcycles.

The good news is that Rudd Weathwax was training dogs more than 60 years ago, and a new tool has come along that makes a world of difference: the modern e-collar.

To be clear, the modern e-collar is not the same as the cheap, hot, and quite unreliable e-collars being sold on Ebay or Amazon for $30-$50.

These things are 30-year old off-patent technology that is too often incompetently constructed.  Stay away from this cheap out-of-date technology like the plague.

What you want is a modern e-collar made by E-Collar Technologies or Dogtra. These collars have up to 100 levels of stimulation, send signals for a half mile or more, and cost about $200 each. In my opinion these collars are worth every dime, and I would accept no substitute

If you will not fork out $200 for a modern and reliable e-collar, my advice is to keep your dog on-leash and be done with it.

That said, if you are serious about training a high prey-drive dog to walk off-leash in field and forest without it chasing rabbits, deer, squirrels, cats, and other dogs, you will find a modern e-collar as revolutionary as a cell phone or an airplane.

My own two working terriers weigh just 9 and 12 pounds, and they were trained off-lead on an E-Collar Technologies Mini-Educator whose dial setting has never moved higher than 8.

The same e-collar, albeit perhaps set at a different level, will train a 130-pound Rottweiler or Irish Wolf Hound.

For reference, I have never met a human that can feel my collars at level 8. Most folks only begin to feel a very light tingle ("Is that all there is," they ask?) between levels 10 and 12.

What does a modern e-collar do? How's it work?

Simple: It's a radio transmitter that sends a low-level electrical tap, not a zap, to the dog's collar.

This tap works to break through the attention-deficit and obsessive-compulsive behavior that so often plagues the minds of dogs.

Using an e-collar is not mean-spirited stuff.

In fact, a tap from an e-collar is analogous to reaching out to touch someone on the tip of their nose when they are not paying attention or are dead-focused on watching a movie. The touch does not hurt, but it certainly breaks into their train of thought, and gets them focused on what you are saying!

And so it is with the modern e-collar.

The e-collar is not designed to train, but to proof. Proofing is mostly about getting a dog to focus and not brain-wander or brain-obsess.

Do modern e-collars also have a "boost" function to send a more powerful NO signal if that is needed?

They do.

My own working terriers have their "boost" set at 12 (out of 100), which is an electronic tap so low that a human can barely feel it. It feels lighter than a fly landing on your hand, but it's enough to stop my dogs dead because they have been trained.

Bigger and thicker-headed dogs might need a higher setting, but modern e-collars are about signaling and training dogs, not about hot shocks to "bust" an entirely untrained and out-of-control dog off a deer, fox, rabbit, or cat.

This is modern dog training technology, not the older "buster" technology of the 1970s and 80s.

Modern e-collars have several options to send different kinds of signals to a dog: a tapping stimulation, a vibration mode, and a tone.

People new to e-collars imagine that the vibration mode, which is similar in sensation to what a cell phone does, must be the "gentlest" way to signal a dog, but in fact most dogs actually prefer a low-level electrical "tap". In fact, with my own dogs, the only evidence that a signal has been sent at all is a change in what they are actually doing. If my dogs are too far out, and I tap once, and they know to come back immediately. If they get up and come off a one-hour down stay while I binge watch TV, a single tap will remind them that they have not yet been released, and they will circle back to lie down on their cot.

Because e-collars offer the prospect of perfect timing at a distance, simple voice commands and corrective taps quickly become paired. In short order, you will find you have gone weeks without tapping the collar even once.

This is what e-collars bring to the table: reliable proofing at a distance.

E-collar training and proofing is not hard or complicated. The main point is to start training your dog the old fashioned way first, with leash, flat collar, and treats. Once your dog knows the basic commands, you can begin "proofing" the commands using a low-level "tapping" stimulation.

Dog trainer Larry Krohn has a good, short instruction manual on the basics of e-collar settings and techniques which is available off of Amazon, and I would order that low-cost practical guide when you order your modern e-collar.  I also heartily recommend Marc Goldberg's book "The Art of Training Your Dog," also available from Amazon.

As with all dog training, e-collar proofing is a process not an event. Just as every dog comes with a different level of drive, intelligence and bidability, so too will every dog come with a different "working level" for e-collar training.

Start low, and on leash, and slowly move up. The goal is a tap, not a zap. The primary function of the modern e-collar is to send a well-timed and mild signal at a distance in order to break through the natural ADD and OCD of the dog. Only under very rare circumstances should you ever need to send a stronger "zap" to stop a behavior, and even then the zap should be quite mild -- no more than what you would readily give yourself.

A final note: there are many kinds of dog trainers, but far too many have no idea how to stop an unwanted and strongly coded self-reinforcing behavior.

If you come across a dog trainer who has no idea how to get a small terrier to quickly stop barking, my advice is to find another, more competent, trainer. Money is too expensive to waste on a dollar-per-hour charlatan.

By the same token, if someone presents themselves as a dog trainer, but does not own the full panoply of tools needed to train a wide range of dogs with a wide variety of problems, I would hold on to your wallet. Whether a dog trainer trains with a prong collar or not, every competent dog trainer should own several, if for no other reason than to have actually learned how they work and why they might be the right tool to use for the 105-pound women with a shoulder injury who needs to walk her Rottweiler.

The same can be said for head halters, and modern e-collars.

Every tool has its place, and even if a dog trainer does not typically use a modern e-collar in their training regime, if they do not own one and know how to use it, they should not be charging for their dog training services.

The bottom line is that you can train your dog to walk off-leash in field and forest without any harm coming to rabbit, fox, deer, squirrels, or feral cats that you may come across.

Is this is a quick thing to teach a game-bred dog that is brimming over with prey drive?

No, but it is certainly within the capabilities of any dog and dog owner, and it's a real game changer if you like to hike and hunt through field and forest.