DeMott gets inside dogs' heads

John Mercer

May 14, 2008 10:48 pm

— MOULTRIE — A dog is just a dog unless it’s well trained. Then it’s just a well-trained dog.
“Most people forget that you can train a dog to do a lot of things, but in the end it’s still a dog,” said Lisa DeMott, who for the past three years has become quite proficient at the art of dog training.
“First you must get their head,” she said while putting her Labrador retriever Toby through a training session Wednesday morning at the ponds behind Heritage Church, of which she is a member. “By that, I mean you have to get them paying attention to you.”
DeMott has always loved dogs and thought it would be fun to have a gun dog.
But therein lies the beginning of potential problems.
Gun dogs, working dogs, are usually large and need plenty of room. They don’t necessarily make good pets especially in the house. Unless they are well trained and obedient.
Enter DeMott.
She gets instructional help from Tracy Davis, a professional trainer in Pavo who has helped her in her quest to become a good trainer, and she credits Davis’ tutelage.
“You have to be with someone who really knows what they’re doing,” said DeMott, who considers herself an amateur. “If you don’t know what you’re doing you can ruin a dog.”
Lisa and Toby have had a lot of success. Toby has won numerous field trial ribbons and has earned the “Senior Title” recognition and the first leg to his “Master Title” recognition.
Toby, like any other dog DeMott works with, started young. Through his training he has been an eager and energetic student. His hard work — and DeMott’s — have paid off.
He responds to her hand signals and well as vocal commands as she puts him through a session.
The payoff came when DeMott’s husband, Scott DeMott, took Toby to Nebraska on a pheasant hunt.
Though the Labs are her breed of choice, DeMott has worked with other breeds and is currently beginning work with her husband’s cocker spaniel puppy. She’s also done obedience training with Australian shepherds and other retrievers.
“It’s really fun. I just love it,” said the busy mother of four — two of them in college, the third who graduates from Colquitt County High School this month and a 12-year-old at home.
DeMott has begun obedience training for the public and her work with an individual dog may take a month or more.
“I’ll take a dog home with me or go to the dog for about a month for training, but often the time spent training dogs to obey does vary with different breeds,” she said.
“For instance, a herding dog nips at the animals it’s herding. That’s how it gets them to move and that trait is in its lineage. But if a herding dog is a pet, then nipping at people is unacceptable. So you have to train that behavior out of the dog.”
“When I work with a dog,” DeMott said, “I like to use attrition training. By that I mean that I’ll show a dog something I want him to learn. Then I’ll show him again, and again, and again before I put harder pressure on him to learn that thing.”
DeMott said that some dogs, because of their breeding, just take longer than others. Some, particularly alpha male dogs, may take much longer than a month and some just can’t be helped.
“That’s why I say you have to get into their heads. Dogs don’t think the way people think,” she said.
DeMott, too, has learned a lot. Not just about training dogs, but about herself.
“I’ve found that from training dogs I’ve become more confident with myself,” she said.