well, just as an example of the many ways you could use to teach a dog the down:
Koehler, you have the dog in a sit, you pull his front feet forward and push down on his back. Once you’ve forced him to the ground, you praise. After he’s finally realized you want him to do the moving into the down himself, you start adding in collar corrections if he doesn’t comply immediately.
Practically everyone else, including most clicker-trainers, simply lure the dog into a down using food a few times. Then they stop luring and wait for the dog to offer the down, and then they reward in some way.
All of Koehler is taught like that- you do all the work, and physically position the dog. Since the dog didn’t move himself, it often takes awhile for the dog to make the mental breakthrough that you actually want HIM to move himself into position. A BIG side-effect of this kind of training is the dog becomes very passive- he waits for you to give him orders, and he’s afraid to try anything because if he’s wrong he gets popped. Unfortunately, a lot of people like passive shut-down dogs like this- they think they are “well-behaved” because they don’t do much unless ordered to. You’ll see these dogs “freeze up” in the obedience ring sometimes- they are unsure of what they are supposed to do, so they just quit moving in hopes they won’t earn a collar-pop or other punishment. Unlike clicker-trained dogs, who when unsure happily offer behaviors.
Example: bad toss of the dumbbell in the ring, and it actually bounces out of the ring. The Koehler dog will be confused and stop moving, waiting to be shown what to do; the clicker-trained dog will happily leap over the fence and get it, because he’s been taught to think and figure things out on his own.
Example: doing the “signals” exercise in the ring. My clicker-trained dog, young, is distracted and misses the signal to move from the down into the sit. We stare at each other, and she knows something is not right, and finally she decides to offer some behaviors- and sit is always a good one to offer, so we make it through the exercise. A Koehler-trained dog would just lie there forever, waiting to be told what to do, too afraid to move.
Aside from the fact that it is slow and rather ineffective compared to other modern methods of training, no one except some pet dog trainers use it anymore because the results just aren’t good enough for most sports. You need the sparkle and drive of a motivationally-trained dog to succeed in most sports today. And most people who need very reliable off-lead dogs, like hunters or SAR workers, usually start with motivational methods and move onto ecollars. BIG problem with any training method that relies on collar-pops as it’s main “motivation to obey” is it’s very difficult to transition to off-leash work- your motivator goes away when you take off the leash.
