Welcome to Amaterasu's story
In this post I will lay out the purpose of this site and a brief explanation of the training method I'll be using.
Thank you very much for taking the time to visit my site. On this website I will be documenting the life and adventures of my recently born first dog, Amaterasu, or Tera for short. A difficult name to pronounce for most Westeners, but one that has great meaning for me. I will enlighten you on this in a separate post.
Why this site
Time will tell exactly what this site will become, but the idea at the moment is to document her training progress, in which I will share all the good and bad. Nobody benefits when I share only the things that go well, and hide the issues I run into. If I or Tera have a bad day, I will share that. This way, we can all learn from our ups and downs in my journey to make Tera into the 'perfect canine companion'.
My plan is to emigrate from the Netherlands to Portugal around this time next year, so preparing her for the journey, and the adventures following the move will absolutely be part of this.
The training
This will not be a 'how to train your dog' type blog; I am no dog trainer and have little hands-on experience. I am fairly confident in my foundational knowledge, since I have been studying quite intensively for a few years now. Tera's training is paramount, so I likely won't vlog the whole thing (or anything); it will be challenging enough as it is. I will try to write a blog post as much as I can.
Operant conditioning
While my training will be overwhelmingly based on positive reinforcement, I will use all quadrants of 'operant conditioning', so I will also indicate to the dog that a certain behaviour is unwanted. This will be done using both positive and negative punishment. 'Punishment' in operant conditioning simply means: doing something that results in a behaviour being displayed less often (or stopping a certain behaviour altogether).
Many opponents of the operant 'punishment' in dogs still mistake it for the abuse people used to do to their dogs decades ago. That old-fashioned way often doesn't result in the preferred outcome, and ruins the relationship with your dog, likely messing up the dog mentally in the process. Modern methods are a lot more effective, and also fair to the dog, focusing on a relationship based on love, respect and clear communication.
I will dedicate a full post to the how and why I will be using this methodology, proven effective by decades of scientific research, and why I think not telling your dog 'no' (correcting) is unwise.
Disclaimer
I really wish this part wasn't necessary, but nowadays even the dog training world can be quite nasty and intolerant.
If you are horribly offended by my training method, and feel the urge to be immature and/or rude about it, please leave this site. I am not asking for you to agree with everything I do, I just ask for decency.
You are obviously free to disagree with my training methods and still follow along. In fact, you are very welcome to. We can disagree over a methodology, but still connect through our love for our animals.
Like we all do, I will make mistakes. What I do is out of love for my dog, and to become as perfect a leader that she needs and deserves, and I will adjust my tactics to achieve that. Let's all learn and grow on this journey!