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Old June 29th, 2011, 07:56 AM
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hazelrunpack hazelrunpack is offline
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They sure do learn by watching each other. We've seen that even in older dogs that we brought in--not only did they learn from each other, but the dogs that were here already were actively teaching the newbies. Denying the pups access to each other will also preclude them learning from useful lessons from each other.

The only times we ever separated Cole and Ember were when they played too rough in the house and needed to take a breather, and then only for a few minutes till they settled down; or when each was getting his own training session. Most of the time, however, our dogs all interact more or less freely--within the rules of the house, of course.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Groenendael View Post
Your dogs must have an amazing life; all this freedom and playtime! It must be fantastic to watch them interact with eachother. But before letting my "monsters" play so many times during the day, I think I must continue a bit more with the one on one training (like you also said). I am really very selfish, but I need them to be focused on me. I was thinking that we would "beat" a few Border Collies (not an easy task), on the agilitycourse in the future. Thank you so much for your answer!
Despite all the freedom and interaction, they did grow up looking to us and being quite independent of one another. As puppies they got the same sessions of one-on-one training as all our dogs do. It's the one-on-one activities that you do with them that strengthens the bond between human and pup, but we've never noticed that allowing the dogs to freely interact the rest of the time impacted their response to us. It didn't take a lot of one-on-one cuddling/training/grooming to bond them to us, and as the source of good things (cuddling/food/even happy praise can be a reward for them) we tended to be their main focus when they weren't rough-housing with each other. We tailored training to the length of their attention spans (as pups, they don't have a very long one ) and gradually increased the duration of training and its complexity as they got older.
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