While we’d all love to have an Assistant To The Regional Manager, management in dog training means something a bit different…
Management strategies should be a priority when bringing a new puppy or even older adopted or rescued pet into your home. Actively and proactively looking at our environment for ways to help make our pups successful will go a long way in helping make transitions easier and training more enjoyable for you and your pup.
Management, like most things in positive reinforcement training, and in life, is a bit fluid. We use dog management strategies to help our pup and ourselves navigate the environment around us, to help reduce unwanted behaviors, and to increase positive experiences and interactions while we work to build skills. It can be helpful, particularly when first bringing a new pup into your home to look at the relationship between management and skill building like a scale.
We initially start with heavy or increased management because our skills are still developing. As our toolbox of skills grows, generally, our management can decrease.
As your pup grows and your skills toolbox increases, there will be times where you can make an active choice between management and training in a particular scenario. It’s important to note that when encountering the same scenario again at a different time, or under slightly different circumstances, your choice to use management or active training may be different. That’s why it’s important to make sure to always be mindful of your pup's ability to be successful and work within their current skill level at that moment.
Modern perspectives regarding dog management strategies steer away from strictly trying to prevent unwanted behaviors, but also look forward in terms of meeting your pup’s needs. Traditional concepts of management focus more on confinement and prevention through environmental limitations, while modern understanding of management also includes providing opportunities to practice appropriate behaviors and meet needs.
For example, a traditional approach to management might offer using a crate for your pup’s confinement. While this can indeed create a safe space for them to exist while they grow, it can also be woefully boring and frustrating for your pup. A more modern and proactive approach to confinement management might be using a larger pen area that has age-appropriate enrichment options for your pup.
If your pup is teething and chewing on furniture is an issue, traditional management may simply include putting your pup in a crate to remove access to furniture, while more modern perspectives might also include making sure they have plenty of appropriate things they can chew on instead.
Management can also be used to solve some behaviors entirely by making changes to the environment. For example, if you have a pup that routinely gets into the trash, a simple management strategy could be removing the trash behind a door, eliminating access entirely. Trash can shenanigans, solved.
In other instances, we use dog management strategies while we actively work to build skills to help navigate the particular scenario. For example, while we work with our pup on politely greeting guests coming into the home, we can have them separated behind a gate, or on leash. In this instance the management strategy is helping to control or prevent the rehearsal of the unwanted behavior of inappropriately greeting guests while we actively spend time training relevant skills first.
As the toolbox of skills grows and the pup learns how to have controlled greetings, we can start to remove or lessen the management needed.
Management is a great tool to help make sure we are being mindful of our pup's current skill level and not putting pups in a situation that they haven't been properly trained for yet. As your pup grows, it’ll be helpful to consider management as just one part of an overall plan rather than a singular solution.
Need a little extra support? Book a complimentary call with one of our dog experts
Sometimes management is criticized as merely avoiding scary things or triggers. However, management is generally the singular necessary first step in helping build positive behaviors around those triggers. Failing to provide management can often lead to an increase in fearful, anxious, and reactive behaviors.
Management can take many forms, some we don’t even realize; examples of management include keeping appropriate distance from triggers, providing safe areas for accessing toys, food, etc., and practicing necessary behaviors, creating controlled situations for training and building skills, or thoughtfully tailoring activities or outings to keep pups feeling safe.
Choosing and utilizing a less busy or noisy walking route for a sensitive or reactive dog is an example of a necessary proactive management strategy.
Puppy behavior management and training work hand in hand, even for pups with big feelings. Management is crucial when training isn’t an immediately available option, and training can throw you a life-line if your management happens to fail. Understanding the relationship between the two is crucial when helping your big-feeling pup navigate their world.
There are many times throughout your pup’s life where situations will need to be managed in-the-moment for issues of safety, think keeping a leash on when in an unfenced area—but there may also be times when management can be over-used or used inappropriately.
In order to make sure we aren’t potentially over-managing a situation, we must always be mindful of our pup’s body language as well as their biological and psychological needs as a sentient being.
For example, when working on potty training a puppy, traditional understanding of puppy behavior management is to use crate confinement to decrease potential for accidents. However, if we are not providing enough instances, frequently enough for the puppy to meet all their age-appropriate biological and psychological needs, we are actually doing more harm than good with this management technique. The same can be said if we are using confinement as a punishment.
As an example for the above scenario regarding managing appropriate greetings, it’s important to make sure that we take into account that dogs are social and have a psychological need for socializing, both with humans and other pups.
If we completely restrict all access to social interactions forever, we can actually be having a negative effect on the psychological needs of our pup. In this particular scenario, we must make sure that we are also taking these needs into account when managing, and also provide positive outlets and experiences to meet those needs.
This is why modern perspectives on puppy behavior management also include positive reinforcement training, as well as providing opportunities to fulfill needs, as opposed to simply trying to eliminate or prevent behavior.
Always be thinking proactively about how to incorporate both dog management strategies and positive reinforcement training to help your pup successfully exist in the world around them. Be mindful of ways that management can be used in conjunction with other opportunities to meet your pup’s needs rather than just using management to restrict or eliminate unwanted behavior.
Our team of certified trainers and behaviorists brings over 50 years of combined experience, and every expert is personally vetted, Fear Free certified, and deeply committed to helping dogs (and their people) thrive at home. Need help with your pup? Talk to a dog expert today
