How to train your dog to stop chasing animals:

Imagine taking your dog from one that completely ignores you and starts chasing an animal the second they spot one…

To instead, immediately stopping chasing the second that you ask them to leave the animal alone.

Or even better yet, imagine if you could train your dog to not chase animals at all, without you having to say anything….

As a dog trainer, I’ve helped many dog guardians achieve exactly that with rewards-based dog training. Let’s talk about how!

A VERY brief history of dogs:

It might seem hard to believe when looking at a Beagle, a German Shepherd, and a Chihuahua that they all descended from a common ancestor: wolves.

However, keeping this history in mind will help you understand why dogs chase animals and also how to change that behaviour effectively.

As one of my favourite quotes says:

You become responsible forever for what you have tamed. -ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPERY

It’s believed that humans originally encouraged wolves into our camps for protection. After domesticating* them, we realized that dogs can have much more utility than that.

(*Domestication occurs when humans exert a significant influence over the development of another species so that that species becomes better suited for life with us.)

We selectively bred dogs to have the characteristics that matched our needs—such as moving livestock, hunting with us, guarding us, and much more.

Despite now providing all of the food that our dogs need, those predatory instincts still remain.

We call this dog prey drive, or a dog’s natural instinct to find, chase, and catch prey.

These instincts make complete sense genetically, but they can be undesirable in our modern world.

Luckily, we can use rewards-based dog training to teach our dogs to stop chasing animals while we still satisfy those natural instincts.

I explain exactly how to do that, step-by-step, in my training program: “Stop Chasing: A Step-By-Step Guide to Solving Dog Prey Drive“.

I first came up with this training method in response to the challenges that I was facing with my own dog, Neirah. She was a complete menace with animals. She chased everything, and she even tried to kill what she caught.

As a professional dog trainer, I’ve since taught this rewards-based method to numerous private clients with great success. However, I still didn’t want to publish the method into a book until it was tested and proven without my direct involvement in the training.

So about one year ago, I created a digital version of this training program. The feedback that I’ve gotten has been amazing!

So how does it work?

All of the training steps in the guide are explained in text, photos, and linked video tutorials!

I believe that effective dog prey drive training requires three things:

1. First is management, or a way to prevent the undesirable behavior of animal chasing.
2. Second, you need a progressive training program. For rewards-based dog traing to be effective, your dog needs to be set up to act desirably. This provides an opportunity to reward and a behaviour to build upon. I do recognize that prey drive training can be particularly hard to structure. We cannot always control when or where animals are going to pop up on walks. Therefore, in the book I also include foundational training skills, how to incorporate functional rewards for better results, and bonus training exercises that trigger prey drive in a controlled way.
3. And third, we need to offer replacement outlets that satisfy our dog’s instincts. I think of this as draining the dog’s prey drive battery. It’s crucial to the success of the training program and to your dog’s happiness!

I truly believe that this program will help you train your dog to stop chasing animals. You can find out more about it HERE or by watching this video on Youtube: