How long to fix my dog? The LECA Training Philosophy.

Building Confidence Through Play

I am often asked how long it takes to train a dog. Unfortunately, in our industry many dog trainers have led owners to expect that their dog can be "fixed" in 1 session, or 3 sessions, or 2 weeks in your home or at their facility.

It's not unreasonable to ask. Whenever I'm booking for our facility to be cleaned or buying supplies from a vendor, I always ask how long it will take. Unfortunately, every dog is different. Building a training plan around the owner's schedule rather than the dog's mental state can only be accomplished with the use of corrections and by suppressing impulses.

Our training philosophy is rooted in helping dogs thrive and respecting their emotional well being. We train at the dog's pace.

Imagine you're afraid of small spaces. You have claustrophobia. To address this problem, your doctor attaches you to some gizmo and pushes you into an elevator. When you show signs of anxiety, stress, discomfort, and fear, the doctor zaps you with the gizmo but doesn't let you out of the elevator. Instead they keep buzzing you until you have suppressed any and all expressions of your phobia. The doctor didn't ask or care if your fear is resolved, they just suppressed your reaction when you're dealing with your phobia.

If we dealt with humans, we would ask you to go in and out of the spaces of different sizes until you got comfortable with an elevator. Our training gradually reduces and eventually eliminates your phobias through exposure and desensitization. It takes a lot longer to get over your phobia than to learn to suppress it. You can make promises to "fix" the dog if your goal is suppression but not if the goal is a cure.

We train at the dog's pace.

Like people, dogs' emotions come in a spectrum. Some are more intense than others and some are more persistent. To deal with emotions, we focus on changing how the dog perceives their environment, rather than how they react to it.

Our training is positive. We don't use punishment to teach behaviors. We don't yank, pull, yell, or hit the dogs we work with. It's not only unethical and unjust, it simply doesn't work. Our goal is to provide positive experiences for the dog when they are exposed to a challenging situation. The more positive experiences they have, the more we can increase the difficulty of the situation they are exposed to.

A few moths ago, we started working with a dog who has been previously sent away for training. The dog is very curious. During training the dog learned that every time he was curious, about a tree, a dog, a patch of grass, he would get shocked (with an e-collar in this specific example). This didn't teach the dog to be less impulsive about his curiosities, it taught him to be afraid of the world around him. He hated leaving his owner's home and would shake every time he went outside. He got aggressive at people and dogs that would pass by him on the street. He went from curious, to fearful, frustrated, and angry. It's taken us months of exposure training, desensitization, and confidence building to be around other dogs, approach strangers, stop shaking and pulling toward the house. We worked in quiet and eventually louder spaces, went on pack walks, played games and sports. He's a different dog today.

We place training over deterrents and rewards over punishments.

This style of training aligns with our mission to help dogs thrive, is how most owners want to treat their pets, and, in technical terms, generalizes the best. Because we're changing the dog's mental state, it permeates into different environments and situations better than corrective training.

We try to be honest with owners that come to our facility and ask how long it takes to "fix" their dog. We never make guarantees but we've seen thousands of dogs come through our program and we try to provide guidance when we can. But not before working with a dog for a few visits and seeing how they respond to us and the training.