The Most Common Marker Mistakes – Dog Trainer Help

The Most Common Marker Mistakes – Dog Trainer Help Sydney

In my last blog post I started talking about marking the right behaviours, if you don’t know what it means, go and read that post first. Today I’m going to share the most common marker mistakes I have witnessed people make so that you can do a little check on yours, are you making these common mistakes?

1. Not marking at all. This is by far the most common marker mistake, going straight to rewarding the dog without marking anything. This leaves the dog guessing, what was it I did right?
2. Using a marker when giving a treat. This marks giving the treat not the right behaviour. A behaviour must first be marked and then a reward follows.
3. Indicating the reward before marking. This happens when a person moves towards the reward before or at the same time when marking or already has their hand on the reward in the treat pouch for example. Keep your body language neutral, don’t associate a marker with the reward being given, it needs to be associated with the dog’s behaviour.
4. Using a long marker such as good boy/good girl. It’s simply too long, a dog has time to do something else while you say it. Use ‘good’ instead if you must.
5. Marking at the wrong time. This is a very common mistake. Timing is everything when training dogs. If you miss the right moment or accidentally mark the wrong behaviour, reward the dog and just try again. We make mistakes, that’s fine, just try again and try to improve your timing so that you don’t repeat the same mistake.
6. Not planning ahead on what to mark. This is an important aspect of planning your training. What are you going for? Learning something new? Adding duration to something old? Adding distance? It’s a different thing to train just a sit than training a sit at distance, for example. Mark the right behaviour you need for your training goal!