Sunday, July 20, 2008

Dog Training the Ian Dunbar Way

As most of you know we do quite a few interviews with Sunny Ares with Critter Connection.. Well recently she interviewed Ian Dunbar about his training methods and he gave her one of his puppy training DVDs to give out to one of her listeners.. Well, we did call in and surprisingly enough we won this wonderful DVD!!! Me and the girls sat down to watch it the day we got it and boy were we shocked when we put his methods to work on our own pack!!!

It is shocking to see how fast this training works!!! The girls first worked with Pooh and Zack using the methods we saw in the Dunbar video and they were shocked at how quickly these two puppies picked up the commands.. It was unbelieveable!!! In one hour of training they were able to teach these two puppies 4 commands!!!! "Off", "Sit", "Down", and "Stand".. We have never ever seen a training program work this quickly!! I am not kidding.. We used to do the typical on leash training, give the command and manually put the dogs in position and then reward-- which I am telling you is not an easy task when you are trying to get a very excited 70 pit bull into a sit postition when they just want to give kisses!!!

With this method the dogs are off leash and you use a food lure to get them to follow with their noses into position!!! It is amazing!! I actually decided to try it with our 70 lb extremely muscular pit bull -Happy.. Let me tell you as Sunny saw when she was at my house meeting Happy the first time he was extremely difficult to control and trying to get him to sit was quite a chore on leash using a prong collar and trying to push his butt down with the other hand-- you know what I am talking about-- lift up on the leash and push the butt down.. Yeah, try that with this boy-- he was like, "What are you trying to do to me! I don't think so lady-- how about a kiss instead!".. To say the least I thought he was "untrainable" and if we did get him trained it would take months!!

Bring in the food lures and no leash-- using the Dunbar method I am not kidding you this huge boy was sitting like a champ in about 10 minutes with new people watching him (a family was out meeting him the night we decided to try the Dunbar method on him) and about 4 Chihuahuas around him trying to get his treats!! It was so funny we had this small pack of dogs all sitting in about 10 minutes using the food lures!! They got so good at it that now if they ever hear the word "sit" in a sentence they sit!!! Pooh, Takara, Zack, Kanga, Piglet, and Happy were all out there walking around to all of us sitting when told-- even sitting on command for the folks that were there meeting Happy!!!

I strongly encourage everyone to go out and get the training videos using the Ian Dunbar (Serius) method!! He does have quite a few downloads also available for free at www.dogstardaily.com

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