Let’s face it… we’ve all had our dogs choose to not listen to us at one time or another.

We’ve all asked our dog’s to come here, or drop it, or told him NO; only to have him completely ignore us because he’s interested in something else.

At first we try to simply repeat the command, like somehow he didn’t here us the first time.

Sometimes this approach works, and other times it just seems like we just have to start saying No louder and louder.

Why does this happen?

Is this just a dog related issue, or is there a bigger law of learning at work here?

Let’s think about this from a few different angle that more of us can relate to.

For those of you who don’t know, I have an 11 month old son who’s up and walking all over the house.  He has no bad intentions, he just reaches and goes for whatever his little mind feels like going towards.

Sometimes what he goes for are OK, and other times they are a bit dangerous, like when I realized it was time to get some electrical outlet covers as he was reaching for them with his fingers.

When I first saw him reaching for the electrical outlet I shouted “No” at him, not to be mean, but for his safetly.  The second he heard my voice his little head jerked up and he stopped reaching for the light switch.

Did this mean he understood my No command?

Or did he just get startled by dad making some big loug noise.

It was probably the latter, because 2 seconds later he was right back reaching for the outlet.

You see, when we give commands to any living creature those commands need to have consequences.  Those consequences can be either good or bad, but they have to be there to help understanding.

And what animal trainers have known for years, is that if you ask for the same behavior from an animal too many times in a row, especially without a reward, that behavior becomes less and less reliable.

How many times have you told your dog NO, and then rewarded him when he obeyed lately?

The number’s probably slim to none.

So what can you do instead?

I reccommend that you try to teach your dog’s behaviors that mean something to him.  Things like leave it, or drop it, that have very real meanings, and very real ways of training them that allow you to give your dog a reward when he obeys you.

For example, I try VERY hard to never tell my dog NO, and to never yell at him with his name when he’s in trouble.  Instead, I spent time early in his life teaching him to leave things alone like his food bowl, or to drop items on cue that he was chewing.  And I worked on them enough so that they are VERY reliable.

And the second thing I do is I try to use the ‘leave it’ or ‘drop it’ commands as commands for staying out of trouble instead of NO.  And I always have a reward nearby to randomly reward my dog with a food treat for obeying me.

Plus I make sure to continually keep these behaviors sharp by NOT overusing them, and making sure I spend a little time each week giving food rewards for leaving or dropping certain items on command, so he doesn’t just stop listening to me because he knows nothing good ever comes from obeying me.

I encourage you to have an open mind about this topic…

You may be reading this thinking to yourself that your dog DOES understand no because you use it along with punishment, or you swear your dog looks guilty when you tell him NO, or several other reasons.  And to those of you thinking those thoughts, you bring up some great points that I’ll talk to in future posts, as there are some good, bad and easy to misunderstand points to all those points.

But we’ll save them for another day.

Happy Training!

Chet

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 5th, 2009 at 11:02 am and is filed under Dog Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.