Control Unleashed Quotes

“When teaching something new, make sure it doesn't look like something old.”
― Leslie McDevitt, Control Unleashed: The Puppy Program

“Never, during the Whiplash Turn game, use the leash to make the puppy turn to you. Do not take his collar to turn his head to you either. Let the puppy figure it out. Let him learn that his behavior causes new opportunities to arise. Let him get addicted to paying attention to you because the body movements associated with attention behavior, such as turning his head in your direction, cause awesome things to happen.”
― Leslie McDevitt, Control Unleashed: The Puppy Program

“This is why I use the Give Me a Break game structure in so much of my training, because it gives the dogs the opportunity to tell me that they want to keep working. It gives them the choice to take on the pressure of social interaction and work, or to take a break. It makes the conversation between us much more dynamic and much less arbitrary. It is the best way I know of letting the dog tell me how much he is ready for and when he is ready for it.”
― Leslie McDevitt, Control Unleashed: The Puppy Program

“Any time you ask a dog to do anything, you are putting pressure on the dog. It does not matter if you are the most positive trainer in the universe; any social interaction puts some measure of pressure on the social beings involved.”
― Leslie McDevitt, Control Unleashed: The Puppy Program

“If you keep trying to war with the environment, either you or your puppy is going to lose. There will always be something novel in the environment that will engage your puppy's natural curiosity or appeal to his animal nature; that is when you will lose the war. Sometimes people control everything and put their puppy under severe restrictions so that he never gets a chance to experience anything but interaction with his handler as being rewarding. That, in my opinion, is when the puppy loses.”
― Leslie McDevitt, Control Unleashed: The Puppy Program

“Many attention problems that people bring their dogs to me to fix are about the hanlder putting too much pressure on the dog to learn things according to an arbitrary training agenda.”
― Leslie McDevitt, Control Unleashed: The Puppy Program