I am working on training my Havanese to be a psych service dog for myself. she is too food motivated to train with either treats or even her kibble. For some reason it was impossible for me to use a clicker. She is very praise motivated, so I've been working with that instead. She is so so so eager to please that even at just over 2 she is great with any task after 2-3 commands by me. I am so happy!
I should preface this with an admission, being autistic means I don't follow the normal formula of constant drilling and repetition. I recently lost my fully self trained SD to a heart arrhythmia at 3 1/2 years old, so I'm now training my 4th self trained SD (all field bred Labs) and she's now at 16 weeks. The first thing we work on is the bond, which is mostly just doing everything together. We sleep together, eat together, work together, and play together. The second thing we work on is paying attention and listening to me, which I suppose is focus and engagement. We don't do any formal training until about 6 months, but until then we're informally working on the essential basics and good manners toward anything with a heartbeat. I can't stress the importance of structured exercise enough, it solves 90% of all problems before they even start. We use structured walks in mixed environments with an opportunistic attitude. I'm constantly on the lookout for anything that presents an informal training opportunity and try to expose her to as many different environmental variables as possible so we know what we need to work on. Every dog is different in how they handle various stimuli and I want to identify her strengths and weakness ASAP. Right now our primary focus is on recalls and "leave it" because they're the most important for safety reasons and the best for learning attentiveness and listening to me. Good manners are extremely important because there are going to be failures in public access training. If your dog has good manners, all will be forgiven... if it's even noticed by anyone but you. It also solves issues on the human side. Nothing brings out the best in people like a friendly, attentive, well mannered Lab happily working at your side. My dogs aren't trained to be technically perfect, but they have better manners than 90% of the people we meet, and are cordial toward everyone from squirrels to people. I'm not a dog trainer (much less a good one) but I always end up with a best friend that I'm absolutely proud to have by my side everywhere we go :)
