The Importance of Training Your Dog How to Make Mistakes
This isn't a typo and no I haven't gone crazy and yes I want your dog to learn how to make mistakes, encouraged to make mistakes, and I want you to feel amazing because when you watch your dog making a mistake, you just proved that you get it, you just proved how well you are doing in encouraging the development and training of your dog.
Let's backtrack for a moment.
Imagine for a moment that you are playing charades and that the goal is not for you to guess what they are pantomiming, it is your job to do what they are telling you to do, but there is a catch, but all of the clues will be spoken in Chinese. And you don't understand a word of Chinese!
So there you stand not understanding, what do you do?
Well the only thing you can do! Guess! So you sit, you lay down, you stand, you roll over, you try putting your hands up, you try putting your hands to the side, and finally when you hold your nose, your partner jumps up with a cheer at your success.
So how did you figure out this Chinese word and what you were supposed to do? You guessed.
Now let us imagine every time you tried to guess the wrong answer you got a cranky No or a jerk on a leash tied around your neck every time you guessed wrong. It would not be surprising if within a short period of time you quit trying or didn't try very hard.
Dogs don't come preprogrammed in English, German, French or actually any human language. There is actually some valid debate on whether they are actually responding to our words or our body language and the circumstances when we ask what we ask them to do. Humans are pre-programmed, hard-wired to acquire language, dogs are not. Their brains aren't built for the capacity of language in the same way we are. It is surprising considering that they do as well as they do.
The one thing we need from our dogs if we hope to have them shape and place their bodies according to our desires is an eager willingness to try. To try different things, trying to guess what it is that silly human wants next. Without an active, eager willingness to do the wrong thing, in their efforts to find the thing that we want, it can never happen. We need to do everything we can to never shut down this eagerness to try.
The more complex the behavior that we want to communicate to our dogs the more we need his commitment to keep trying again and again and not to give up.
A dog that makes mistakes is a dog that has learned that it is just as important perhaps even more important to make a mistake then it is to get it right in the end.