As a Web designer, my life revolves around three distinct marketing elements: a flurry of creativity, relevant keywords and a sound management system. Not in a million years would I have I argued that canine parenthood is virtually the same – until now. I’m talking about the Pooch Management System, of course, or PMS, and it looks a bit like this:

Case study #1: Teaching Beary how to lie down
Keywords/Call to action: “down” and/or “lie down”
Plan/System: 1 small hotdog slice per correct action completed. Yes, you’ve read right. No, no ordinary treats for Mr. White here. No sir, Mr. White gets HOT DOG SLICES
Reward/Goal: dog lies down

Having scoured and mostly scoffed at many dog training techniques on TV and the Web, which inevitably featured either the prominent and picture-perfect dumb or smart dog on the leash (depending on your viewpoint), I looked at the situation like an annoying Web problem that needed to be cracked. After all, I couldn’t grab Beary’s two front paws and pull them toward me, during the correction phase, because he’d buck right up like a cute, white, fluffy rodeo bull. His usual hard dog treats also didn’t work too well as a reward, mainly because it took too long for him to chew them – and there’s no way that I’d halve them either. So I opted for the cheap food bribe stashed in the fridge – hotdogs – which, to my delight, worked like a charm. Awesome. Score: PMS = 1, Training Videos = 0. “Lie down” and “down” essentially both worked during training, so I don’t know if that raises his puppy IQ by two points, ha. Probably not. Anyway, the key element that worked was the consistency of the training. Having a PMS in place immediately guarantees you winning half the battle that is dog training. Now, if I could only teach him how to get back up…