I attended my orientation for obedience class the other night. I suspected something was fishy when the trainer told us to leave our dogs at home. The first two hour class was only for humans.
The trainer is fantastic. Really knows her stuff. She has a great sense of humor and a way with analogies. However, she had some hard truths to share.
Your dog cries at night? Your dog digs up the yard? Your dog pees in the house? Guess what. The dog doesn’t have a problem with any of these behaviors. She thinks they are fun. You however, do have a problem. You need to either learn to deal with these behaviors (thus eliminating your problem) or train your dog not to do them. If you don’t train your dog not to do something, you are essentially granting permission to the dog to continue on with what it is doing. Problem behavior is your problem.
This is hard to hear. Especially when it goes on for two hours.
According to the trainer, 98% of “behavior problems are due to the following 4 issues:
- Not enough physical exercise
- Not enough mental exercise
- Confusion
- Missing “the pack” i.e. the people in the dog’s life
So how does one fix problem behaviors? Eliminate the four factors. More exercise is the obvious answer, since a longer walk will also provide time with the pack and mental exercise. But how to eliminate confusion?
Rules.
Dogs (apparently) crave structure and rules. They want to know where they stand in the hierarchy of the pack and they want to understand all the rules to this big game we call life. They need to know what they are NEVER allowed to do (knock over the garbage, pee on the rug) and what they are ALWAYS allowed to do (chase the ball, chew the bone). Dogs don’t understand sometimes or “just this once.” So the leader of the pack (that’s me) has to create and enforce rules and stick by them. EVERY SINGLE TIME.
So there are all these rules. The trainer says Matilda needs to earn her keep. She has to sit before I can pet her. She has to sit and stay before I feed her. She has to walk to the door and sit before I can take her outside. She has to drop the ball and sit before I throw it. I have to be in control of every interaction, because in every interaction, I am teaching her something, whether I mean to or not.
The trouble is, that means I have to remember to MAKE HER sit, or stay, or lie down. I have to create the rules and then remember all of them. I have to change the way I interact with her, if I am ever going to change the way she acts.
I am sensing a theme already, even though I have only been to one class and only gotten one homework assignment. This whole training thing is as much about teaching me to be a good pet owner as it is about teaching Matilda to be a good dog. This reminds me vaugely of a conversation I had, once upon a time with some of the fine folks on this blog, about a NY Times article on “spouse training” using animal training techniques. According to the trainer, there is very little difference between training a pet and training humans, especially human children. It all starts with training the trainer.
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April 1, 2007 at 5:25 pm
SciTeacher
Yeah, I hadn’t even reached the end of this post before thinking…this definitely applies to my 9th graders.
April 2, 2007 at 12:33 pm
Rebekah
And by “applies to my 9th graders,” you mean, “applies to me.” I’d be interested to hear about the rules and structure you are giving your students. Do you stop every time you walk into a room and think, “what am I about to teach them?” Being a fine, upstanding gentleman, you are of course teaching them much more then biology. You are a role model and with every word, gesture and even clothing choice, you are teaching them something.
That sure is a lot of responsibility, don’t you think?