by Zak George
Unfortunately, most people focus only on the first kind of structured primary sessions I addressed in this section, but they skip the surprise ones. Then, they’re shocked that their dog can’t focus when they’re training them in a real-life, secondary session. Without those surprise sessions under her belt, your dog likely won’t know how to react appropriately.
So, what do you do in secondary training sessions? Most importantly, get your dog’s attention on you as soon as possible and reward her with her currency if she complies. For example, say you’re on your daily walk with your dog and she suddenly spots another dog or cat down the street. If your dog starts to lunge and bark, then create distance between your dog and the distraction until your dog is compliant. Reward her when she is. Or say you’re home and an unexpected guest suddenly knocks on your front door. If your dog starts barking and running toward the door, then take the time to get your dog’s attention on you and reward for quiet behavior, even if it’s minimal at first.
There may well be times when your dog is too distracted to focus on you during a secondary training session. In those cases, the key is to simply manage your dog by getting away from the thing that’s setting her off. Then, take a step back and, when you have time, set up primary training sessions to better prepare your dog.
So, if your dog starts regularly chasing bicycles when surprised by one, make it a point to do some primary training with your dog on leash in the presence of bikes at your local park where you can control the distance between your dog and the bikes. Your goal would be to desensitize her to bikes during the primary sessions so she won’t be as surprised or reactive to them. (There’s much more on desensitization in the next section and throughout the book.) In other words, when you cannot get your dog’s focus in a secondary session, you have to do more primary training and surprise primary training.
I know that you’ll have many questions about how to conduct these various types of training sessions in specific instances. Throughout this book, I’ll give you examples of how to implement primary, surprise primary, and secondary training sessions to resolve all sorts of behavior problems. If you practice all three types of lessons in all aspects of your training, you most certainly will have a dog who listens to you reliably.
8. LEARN THE THREE CRITICAL BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION TECHNIQUES
You’ll notice that there’s a basic framework that I apply when addressing many behavior problems: management, desensitization, and conditioning or counterconditioning. These behavior modification techniques go hand in hand, and I’ll explain often and throughout the book how to achieve progress with this formula! Here’s a breakdown of each.
1. Management
Management is really key with dog training—and, quite honestly, this is where most people make mistakes. What I mean by management is controlling your dog’s environment—as described earlier in this chapter—and, in the case of anxiety and fear, keeping your dog from being overwhelmed in a certain situation. For example, your dog cannot jump on guests if she is on leash and several feet away from your guests. She can’t chew your shoes or dig up your yard if she doesn’t have unsupervised access to either. She can’t experience overwhelming fear of, say, your vacuum cleaner if you don’t turn it on next to her.
Management also means using the environment itself to intentionally train at your dog’s current level of ability. Maybe your dog is great when you ask for a “look at me” when she’s thirty yards away from a particular distraction, but perhaps she doesn’t listen at ten yards away. By managing the intensity of various distractions, you are putting your dog in a better position to succeed.
Stopping all unwanted behaviors first requires you to bring the behavior to a stop. You shouldn’t do this by punishing or forcefully making your dog stop doing something undesired. Instead, you can be one step ahead of her and prevent very predictable behaviors, like jumping, from occurring in the first place. So, if your dog is continually doing things that you wish she wouldn’t, ask yourself how well you are managing her surroundings. I bet you’ll find that you could probably control her environment a bit better.
Of course, while management is critical in dog training, it’s only part of the equation. Along with making sure your dog doesn’t engage in undesirable behaviors, you also need to teach her the correct ones. That’s what this book is all about!
2. Desensitization
Many common behavioral issues—especially those related to anxiety and fear—are a result of a dog being unfamiliar with something. For instance, many dogs might bark at other dogs or people in public because they are unfamiliar with those dogs and people. Or they may freeze up on a leash because they’re not used to a new park. Very often, a dog simply needs to get familiar with something to then become civilized around it! Desensitization lets you carefully expose your pet to whatever is causing her anxiety or fear at a level that’s not too overwhelming for her.
We can all relate to this. Think about the first day of school when you were a kid. Maybe you were a little nervous (or very nervous as was the case for me!). You didn’t yet know who would be in your class, what your teacher was going to be like, or how hard the curriculum was going to be. But sure enough, after a few days or weeks, those emotions were tempered, and you probably relaxed a bit. You were, in fact, less sensitive as those unknowns became familiar and you adapted and adjusted to them.
It’s the same way for dogs. A dog might be scared of a new place or person. However, after spending time in that new place or with that new person without anything bad happening, she might start to realize, “Hey! I’m okay. There’s nothing to be nervous about.” In other words, frequent, safe, planned exposure to things that cause dogs to become nervous or fearful should be a powerful part of your training strategy.
3. Conditioning and Counterconditioning
When we talk about conditioning a dog in dog training, we simply mean getting your dog to have a favorable association with something. For example, when you ask your dog to sit and then give her a treat when she does, your dog learns, “Wow, I complied with that request and got something awesome as a result.” This causes her to become conditioned to sitting more reliably when you ask her to sit in the future.
When we talk about counterconditioning, we mean that we are changing an existing association to a particular stimulus. Let’s say that a dog is nervous around strangers. Maybe she has had bad experiences with new people, or she simply lacks exposure to people. Either way, she has a response to strangers that you’d like to change.
If you begin to offer amazing treats to your dog in the presence of strangers, then your dog might stop thinking, “I’m terrified of strangers!” and start thinking, “I love strangers because I often get something great when I’m around them.” Of course, I’m oversimplifying a bit here to make my point, but this concept is critical in training. So, throughout the book, I’ll give specifics on how to countercondition your dog to things to which she already has an undesired response.
Here’s another example: a lot of the dogs I film videos with are nervous in my studio at first because it’s a new place—and many dogs become uneasy in new places. So, if a dog seems apprehensive, I immediately initiate counterconditioning measures and offer her small bits of chicken or a super-fun squeaky toy to play with. With really nervous dogs, I’ll also encourage them to relax and let their people provide subtle comfort in the hope that this may reassure them. In other words, I’ll do what I can to change the dog’s mind-set from something like, “This place is making me nervous” to “This place is actually pretty awesome.”
9. PRACTICE CONSISTENCY
One of the most essential aspects of dog training is extreme consistency. I can’t stress this enough! When you commit to asking your dog to, say, come when called, stay with her and encourage her to do exactly that until she does (assuming you’ve already taught her this skill, of course!). Avoid sending mixed messages—say, by stopping
to search something on Google in the middle of your training and forgetting that you’ve asked your dog to come to you. You’ve got to see the training session through to the end.
Also, the more your dog engages in an unwanted behavior, the more ingrained that behavior becomes. So, if your dog is left to bark outside for ten minutes at a time before you intervene, then this barking will likely get worse over time. You want your dog listening to you as close to 100 percent of the time as possible, which means you’ve got to send her the correct messages as close to 100 percent of the time as possible.
What’s more, difficulties can be compounded if you have children or other family members who aren’t as fully committed to training as you are. It does you no good if you’re a stickler at putting a stop to begging at the table but your kid is drop--ping scraps on the floor during dinner. You’ve all got to be on the same page.
10. KEEP YOUR EXPECTATIONS REALISTIC
It takes a while for a dog to acquire the life experience and guidance from you necessary to know how to behave in a variety of circumstances. You need to dedicate a lot of time to achieve the results you want. By rushing training, you only get mediocre results and wind up delaying true progress in the long run. Just as you wouldn’t insist that a preschooler learn to read by reading Shakespeare, you shouldn’t insist that your dog behave perfectly after only a few lessons.
You might have encountered other dog trainers who promise that they can teach you how to perfectly train a dog in a week or a month or six weeks. However, in my experience, you can’t realistically train your dog to behave the way you want in all sorts of situations in such a short amount of time. For example, when I teach people how to teach their dogs, I explain that it will take up to one year to do so. Sure, you can certainly teach the fundamentals such as “sit,” “stay,” and “come” in a month or two, but it takes a lot more time for your dog to truly understand how to behave in a variety of contexts.
In other words, no matter how well your dog demonstrates that she understands a new principle, remember that it takes time for dogs to internalize that skill and behave as you wish in unfamiliar places and settings. Your dog may know “stay” when in a rehearsed training exercise, but how well does she stay when a cat surprises her on a walk or a guest suddenly arrives at your house? To get her staying in those situations, you will frequently need to set up surprise primary training sessions that mimic these real-life situations. You’ll also need to snap into training mode whenever the unexpected happens, as I discussed earlier in this chapter.
Sadly, many people have unrealistic expectations, and they expect a dog to, say, stop barking at a person walking in front of the house or to stop pulling on a leash in just a few training sessions. When the dogs don’t, these people resort to quick fixes such as choke, prong, or electric collars.
I don’t blame everyday people for this. Sadly, the dog training community is largely broken and dysfunctional because there’s a massive amount of misinformation out there when it comes to advising the public how to teach dogs. People are left to believe that a dog can be trained in thirty days. And if their progress isn’t coming along at this rapid rate, then they assume their dog must require a more disciplined approach. Resorting to these harsh, primitive forms of “communication” only conveys intolerance and a lack of patience and empathy to your dog.
Plus, they don’t really work. Too often learned helplessness—which is a behavior first identified in dogs by psychologists Martin Seligman and Stephen Maier at the University of Pennsylvania in 1967—is interpreted as training success.5 But it’s not. “Learned helplessness occurs when an animal cannot escape from an aversive situation, and it can no longer effectively fight back to alleviate a punishing circumstance,” says John Ciribassi, DVM, DACVB, past president of the American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior and coeditor of the book Decoding Your Dog. “Animals are not learning at these times. Instead, they emotionally close down. Placing any animal in this type of situation is inhumane—I compare it to a person in an abusive situation who has no options to escape the abuse.”6
Also, keep in mind that there are going to be times when you become frustrated. Occasionally, your dog might take a big step backward in her training. This is all normal. However, you’ll need to remain as patient as possible. Progress is unlikely to occur when you are frustrated, so it’s okay to take lots and lots of breaks when teaching your dog.
It’s the same with kids: patience is critical. Picture a kid who plays baseball. Throughout his years of playing the sport, he’ll probably have lots of different coaches. Some he’ll love; others not so much. Almost certainly, the ones he’ll love are the ones who genuinely and patiently motivate him to do well. They take the time to correct his swing. Instead of yelling at him when he drops a fly ball, they just encourage him to work harder at catching the next one. They routinely practice with the kids to show them how to work through difficulties and enthusiastically acknowledge when they are on the right track. I promise you that kids are more likely to excel when they have leadership like this rather than a coach who yells and screams. It’s not that the harsher, impatient coaches are completely ineffective, but they likely won’t be a contributing factor to furthering a kid’s passion for baseball.
In other words, always keep the big picture in mind. Remember, success is usually very slow to come at first. However, if you allow your dog time to grasp new concepts, stay supportive, and follow the advice I’ve given throughout this chapter, you’ll find that she’ll learn to love working with you. And that’s when you’ll really start seeing true progress.
CHAPTER 2
WHY DOGS BEHAVE “BADLY”
I know that many of you picked up this book so you can resolve or prevent your dog’s unwanted behaviors, like nipping, lunging on the leash, or not listening in general. Dogs are certainly easy to love, but they very often come with less than desirable instincts and habits that can be difficult to deal with if you don’t understand them. This chapter focuses on why dogs sometimes behave less than optimally.
You may be thinking to yourself, “I don’t care why my dog is chewing up my furniture. I just want him to stop!” And that’s totally understandable! However, as you’ll learn in this chapter, understanding why dogs likely behave the way that they do is paramount to resolving problems. When the “why” is clearer, so are the solutions.
In other words, you’ve probably heard the expression, “Treat the cause, not the symptom.” Well, this couldn’t be truer when it comes to dog training. Actually, this is what inside-out training is all about.
For example, if you figure out that your dog’s incessant barking, chewing, or digging stems from not getting enough exercise, then he’s probably going to continue those annoying habits until you dedicate more time to engaging him in lots of activities. Or say your dog had a rough start to life and seems to have had negative experiences with men. Well, he might growl or even snap at men until you carefully and deliberately socialize him with them and desensitize him to males.
It’s not that different than it is for humans. If you take some pain medication to stop the cramping you have in your foot, then the discomfort is likely to go away. However, if the cause of the foot pain is that you’re wearing shoes that are too tight, then you’ll continue having pain until you buy a new pair of shoes.
This chapter walks you through the fundamental reasons why your dog might not act as you want him to—so you can refer to it any time you have an issue with your pet. Every subsequent issue addressed in this book also comes with a specific explanation for that particular behavior (like resource guarding or digging). Of course, I also explain what to do about the undesirable behavior.
THE THREE BIGGEST MYTHS REGARDING DOG MISBEHAVIOR
Understanding what doesn’t cause dogs to misbehave is as important as understanding what does. It’s critical not to build training strategies on flat-out myths, but instead to understa
nd the true reasons your dog is behaving a certain way. So, we’ll start with the three biggest myths when it comes to dog misbehavior. Then we’ll delve into the six proven culprits.
Myth #1: Dogs Are Spiteful
Some people think that when their dog misbehaves it’s because he’s intentionally trying to displease them or somehow challenge their authority. I know that many of you reading this will say something like, “My dog knows that he’s misbehaving but does it anyway.” After all, he might put those ears back and turn on those sorry eyes when you discover a chewed-up book or shoe. It’s as though he knows he did something wrong.
However, that’s not the case. Researchers have found that dogs might look ashamed not because they know they’ve done something wrong but because they’re being scolded.
Ljerka Ostojić, PhD, is a comparative psychologist at Cambridge University in England and lead author of a study in the journal Behavioural Processes.1 She said, “I had a client who had three dogs, and whenever something happened like a shoe was chewed, it was always one [dog in particular] that had the guilty look. Yet often she was not the dog who had done it. She was just the most apprehensive dog, and she got frightened more quickly by her owner’s reaction.”2
Alexandra Horowitz is a scientist who teaches canine cognition, heads the Horowitz Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College, and is the author of Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know. She had similar findings in another study.3 Dogs who were scolded for eating a forbidden treat looked just as guilty regardless of if they had actually obeyed or not. In fact, the dogs most likely to show such behaviors as avoiding eye contact, slinking away, or dropping their heads were those who were innocent but still reprimanded.