Disobedient Dog?:Do You Have a Disobedient Dog?

“My Jimmy doesn’t listen to me!” “ If I say ‘come here,’ she runs the other way!” “My dog comes in from a walk and sneaks out of the room to poop where we can’t see!” Don't Complain them as Stubborn, Disobedient. You can train and contain, regardless of any breed, age and any problem.

What do you mean “obedience”? Do my dog ought to do what I say, no matter what? Do I want my dog to show me when there’s a problem? Will I pay attention to what the dog is trying to tell me? Is it the dog’s responsibility to obey me? Is the dog my servant, my partner, my family member, my friend, my burden or my hobby?

You will determine your own beliefs and goals with your dogs. For the sake of discussion, let’s view the dog as a companion. It’s your legal responsibility to maintain the dog in a way that humanely meets the animal’s physical needs and keeps other people and animals from being harmed. If you want to train the dog for a sport, a task, or a job; your basic legal responsibilities remain.

Controlling a dog requires both management and training. The needed management increases when the dog has a temperament more likely to cause harm to others. The more training, the easier the management becomes. There are various training philosophies and techniques. Good trainers and handlers skillfully read dog body language, time their own communications accurately to help a dog understand, and maintain realistic expectations for training.

Some dogs require an especially talented trainer in order to be maintained safely. Certainly, we each need to choose the right type of dog for our own level of ability.

So, how do we get it all together to have a dog who does listen, who responds positively to our cues, and who feels comfortable behaving naturally around people?

Goals Dogs can learn all sorts of things, but they learn much better when we first figure out what we want to teach them. You need a plan. Training goals involve everything from where you want your dog to eliminate to whether you want to campaign this dog as a top conformation special, or go out on search and rescue missions. There are many jobs, sports, and roles for dogs. The dog will also have a lot of “off duty” time. Every decision-making adult in the household needs a voice in determining the household training goals.

10 Effective Learning Principles
Training done well from the start makes the most efficient use of your time, and results in a dog with more consistent success and more confidence. The dog has a good time as do you, and you both look good doing it!

• The dog needs the right foundation to “learn to learn.” This includes the skills basic to almost all training, such as controlled walking with you and coming when called. The dog also needs socialization at the proper early life stages in order to be able to cope with work situations later.
• You need to develop as many ways of rewarding the dog as you can. These include food, games (retrieving is number one), physical stroking, praise, rides in the car, walks, time with a special toy, and particular things the dog likes or wants at that moment. Some dogs enjoy howling with you, for example, and some handlers find tug of war to be appropriate.
• Training that extends over a longer chronological time seems to create longer-lasting learning. One reason for this would be that the training experiences become connected in the dog’s brain with a greater variety of other experiences, such as changing seasons, different clothing on the humans, different times of day (example—early morning tracking in summer, afternoon tracking in winter), and many other differences we could never think to plan.
• Training requires an adequate number of repetitions of the experience for the particular dog. Some dogs require only a few repetitions, while others may require many. There are advantages to both. Obviously the one who requires fewer repetitions could be easier to train, but only if all the experiences you provide the dog in training are accurate. If you train badly, the dog will quickly learn the task differently than you intend. The dog who requires more repetitions will learn the task more slowly and you may get some chances to notice your mistakes and adjust the training before it becomes set in the dog’s habits.
• Dogs learn best in a mental state of play, with stress kept low. This is true of humans, too, and you can see it in play of both puppies and children. Play is their work! A good trainer remembers that training and work need to be fun for the dog, just as a good employer of humans has to remember that the employees have their own motivations, many of which will be different from the employer’s. You need to find out what your dog (or human) trainee desires, and help him or her achieve that desire in doing the task you need learned and performed. Creating such win/win situations is the smart and humane way to train.
• It takes repetition of the training in a variety of settings before the dog is able to generalize that when you give that cue, you want that behavior in all settings. This process gets faster as your dog learns more and more cues. When you start by teaching your dog basic control work and social skills, you can then take your daily training sessions into a wide variety of settings and carry out this training principle without extra work.
• To teach a dog to perform a task correctly, help the dog get it right every time. There are various ways to approach this. One way is to break the task into tiny parts and teach them to high precision individually before putting them together. Another approach is to provide the dog with handling support and direction to closely guide through the task. Gradually eliminate the extra cues as the dog forms the habit of doing the task. Sometimes trainers set a dog up to make a mistake and then correct or punish the dog for that mistake. A risk here is that the punishment might be too severe for that dog, or it might accidentally become associated in the dog’s mind with something you did not want to change. You might cause the dog to distrust you, to lose desire to attempt that task, or to get sidetracked into self defense. Thus, practicing success is more likely to train more quickly and with less risk of undesired effects than practicing failure and attempting to teach through corrections.
• Keep sessions short enough that the dog is never the one who wants to quit first. End on something the dog does well. Releasing into an activity the dog enjoys is a good way to keep the activity level up for high-energy tasks. If your goal in training is a calmer dog, it may be preferable to follow training with a calming grooming session or other quiet activity.
• Some dogs are capable of accepting decision-making responsibility, and some jobs require dogs who can do that. First you train the dog to good habits, to patterns of behavior desirable to you because they make the dog more reliable. You continually reward the dog for trying, being careful never to discourage a dog from effort by correcting a dog who makes an honest mistake. Mistakes made by dogs in training are usually honest ones.

Dogs who don’t do what you want are either confused about what you want or they are just acting on their own instincts of the moment. Rarely does a dog act out of “defiance.” That’s a human motive. When we penalize dogs for acting like dogs because we interpret it as coming from motives on which humans act on but dogs do not, we do them a grave injustice.

With the right genetic gifts, a suitable belief system from good experiences, safe habits from skillful training, and a talented handler, something happens in many dogs that is beyond explanation. They learn to think, to make decisions, and to act responsibly as the handler’s agent when they are in possession of information the handler is not. We find examples of this in the guide dog with a blind handler and in the dog performing a scent task with substances that humans cannot detect.

Mentally, these dogs take wing and fly. We don’t understand it, but we’ve learned to recognize it when it happens, and we know a lot of ways to facilitate it.