This is the best dog training book I have read, and focuses exclusively on pain-free positive reinforcement training with food motivation and sometimes a clicker for certain skills. If it helps you understand how great this book is, I scoured the internet to try to find Jean's email address so I could tell her how wonderful and helpful I thought it was.
Jean is a real pro and she clearly lays out the steps involved in training solid obedience skills while also making it very clear that a new skill is not just "can the dog do it" but rather how accurately does the dog perform the command, how consistently, how accurately and consistently when distractions or new locations are introduced, etc.
She has a really nice progression system that helps you assess if your dog is ready for the next training step, should keep practicing on the current step, or if you need to take a step back and reinforce the previous step to solidify learning. She has a very strong understanding of dog learning mechanisms and explains why so many people fail at training dogs. The reasons are many, but primarily because the trainers expects to much too soon (aka not understanding how long it takes to train an action really well), or you are not being clear enough about what you are instructing them to do (aka inaccurate clicker timing, rewarding partial behaviors, or not being fast enough to correct the incorrect action).
I will say that she describes the process really well in the text, but the accompanying videos (which are also available from the publisher on YouTube) are extremely helpful for visualizing what she is telling you to do. Some of the interactions with her class are obviously staged, but if you can look past how silly some of these interactions are, the content is all there and the videos really helped my understand how to apply this to my dogs in real life.
She does not touch much on behavior modification - this is primarily an obedience text for dogs without "special needs".
Great book, Jean. Thank you!
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