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“The more, the better”? “The more often you train your dog, the faster he will learn”. Apparently this mantra may not be the correct. Additionally, “the longer the training session the better” may also be a misnomer. People training dogs for obedience, service, police or military will often train a dog for at least one or more hours a day. Research shows that this may actually be detrimental to the dog’s learning process and retard the speed of learning instead of increasing it. In fact, dogs may actually learn better if they are not trained everyday for long periods! Dogs trained once a week need fewer training sessions than dogs trained 5 times a week! The performance of Beagles trained to carry out a task using positive reinforcement was analysed. Dogs in Group 1 were trained once a week and were compared with dogs in Group 2 who were trained on 5 different days over a period of a week. The same person trained all the dogs in the same environment. The researchers found that the dogs in Group 1 required fewer training sessions than the dogs trained more frequently in Group 2. Although the training schedule of the Group 2 dogs required almost 50% more training time spent by the trainer for the dog to learn to perform the task, they did learn it within two weeks of training whereas the Group 1 dogs took 6-7 weeks to perfect it. “More is less!” The more often a dog is trained and the longer the training session is, the less the dog learns! A later study compared the performance of Beagles trained to perform a task slightly more difficult than in the previous experiment. This study also examined the influences of the duration of each training session on task learning. The dogs were split into 4 groups.