People talk too much.
As an introvert, spending too much time around an extrovert who just doesn’t know when to stop can be exhausting to me. I often think that’s why I enjoy working with animals (except parrots).
This might come a shock to you, but dogs and humans don’t speak the same language. (If this wasn’t a shock, congratulations, you were paying attention to my previous post!) but when we, as humans, have a breakdown in communication, we tend to address that problem as we would with another human. This is not necessarily a bad thing – it tends to work out pretty well with members of our own species after all – but when miscommunication happens with our dogs and we treat them like humans in little fur coats, then the miscommunication perpetuates.
And humans, even introverts, love to talk! We talk to each other. We talk to ourselves. We talk to our phones. We talk to our dogs. And our dogs, bless them, usually manage to figure out what we are talking about, sometimes even despite our best efforts to the contrary. We expect our canine companions to pick up on “sit” and “down” and “here” out of the midst of our endless chatter and immediately obey.
But when they don’t catch on, in our frustration, we default to human rules of communication – we say it louder, we say it angrier, and we say it again. And again. And again. Until Muttley doesn’t sit when we say “sit” but instead when we say “sit . . . sit . . . siiit, SIT, SIT dammit!”
Is it any wonder that we end up labeling them stubborn, distracted, and dumb?
If you’ve found yourself in this predicament, don’t worry. I’ve done it, too, and even the best dog trainers in the world have done it. We are all human. But instead of expecting our dogs to think like humans, we have to shift our own behavior to find our way out of this communication conundrum.
I’ve got three strategies to help.
1) The Name Game
Don’t get me wrong, teaching your dog their name is super important. It is literally one of the first things I teach any new dog coming into my house, be it a tiny baby puppy or a senior rescue. A fun, easy game to bond with your new pet is to say their name, wait for them to look at you, and then give them a treat. The first time you play it, set yourself up for success by going to a calm, quiet area and showing the pup that you have treats ahead of time, so that they are primed to go! Afterwards, gradually make the game more difficult by introducing distractions and moving to new locations. To play on hard mode, call your dog’s name outside of a set training session when they are chewing a bone, while you watch TV, or in the middle of some other everyday situation, and reward them with some spontaneous playtime.
The important thing to remember is that we are not asking the dog to do anything other than pay attention when we call their name. Although dogs are masters of reading our body language and many of them are really good at picking up our emotions from the tone of our voices, they cannot read our minds. Saying the dog’s name is not the same as recalling, scolding, sending to their kennel, asking them to be still while their nails are trimmed, or getting them to spit out that gross dead squirrel that they just found.
If you are going to use your dog’s name in training, use it to preface a cue but not in place of a cue. “Spot, sit” is perfectly understandable, especially if there are multiple dogs present and you might also need to say “Rover, here” in order to get your point across. Be specific! The more clarity and precision you use in your training, the faster and happier your dogs will learn.
2) Don’t Repeat Yourself; I Said Don’t Repeat Yourself; Stop Repeating Yourself!
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.
A noble sentiment, applicable in dog training to a certain degree – but only if you keep your mouth shut. This is one of the hardest habits for people to break, often because we aren’t even aware that we are doing it. We ask our dog to perform a behavior . . . and they don’t. So we ask again. And they don’t. So we ask again . . . .
On and on and on it goes.
How do we stop?
Don’t start in the first place!
I know, I know. Easier said than done. I’ll break it down for you.
For the sake of argument, we will assume that Fido “already knows” (do they really? how do you measure that? under what circumstances? – a topic for another day) how to sit on cue, and that you are practicing under your usual training conditions with minimal distractions and have tasty food rewards at the ready. You say “Fido, sit” and there Fido stands like a bump on a log, staring at you blankly.
You stand there and stare right back at them. Half of dog training is being more stubborn than the dog. There is no need to glare, huff, or cross your arms. Just wait them out. At some point, that little lightbulb is gonna go off and Fido will sit. Throw a party! Act the fool, give a bunch of treats, praise extravagantly, and act like your dog just won their obedience championship for that sit. Dogs don’t understand holding grudges, so don’t bother being passive aggressive.
Ask them to sit again and I can all but promise you that they will sit faster this time; maybe not right away, but better than before. Yay, what a good dog! Have another party. Ask them to sit again. They’re faster. Party! Sit again. Faster. Party. By the end of your short training session, they will be back to normal.
But what if waiting them out doesn’t work? There are two reasons this might fail. One, Fido doesn’t know the cue as well as you thought they did – that’s fine, the point of dog training is learning, after all. Or two, something in the environment is too distracting and they can’t think with their whole brain. Again, this is fine because dogs have to learn to work around distractions. However, if either the lack of fluency or the environmental distraction is too much for you or your dog to handle at any given time, there is absolutely no shame in shoving a handful of treats in your dog’s face and beating a strategic retreat.
If you are able to make it a learning experience, I hereby give you permission to repeat the cue – but only in the context of making it simpler and more obvious to Fido. In this situation, they are struggling, not stubborn. Take a step back in your training journey and make your cue easier for them to understand.
When I teach a dog to sit, I start out by using a technique called luring. I hold a piece of food in my hand directly in front of Fido’s nose, then lift it up and back. Fido’s nose follows the food and, if my timing is right, as their nose goes up and backwards their butt plops down on the ground. Ta-da, sit. Repeat that a few times and Fido will start to follow my hand motion even if I am not holding food. Then I can begin to make the hand motion less and less obvious. Add the verbal cue “sit” to the hand motion, maybe even phase out the hand motion entirely, and I can consider Fido fluent.
But when they start to struggle, you can go back to an easier stage to help them out. If you ask Fido to sit with a short hand motion and a verbal “sit” and they just stare at you, repeat your verbal “sit” with a much larger, more obvious hand motion. The lightbulb goes on. That’s easier to remember, and Fido sits. Tell them what a great dog they are! Ask them to sit again, this time with your hand motion a little more subtle. By the end of your session, they should be working like normal.
On that note, some older training books will tell you to praise your dog for correctly responding to a cue by using that cue in your praise – so, if you ask Fido to sit and they do, you would say “yes, Fido, good sit!” There’s a couple of problems with this advice, as we have now discovered. One, dogs understand movement a lot better than they understand position. That means that Fido associates the “sit” cue with the act of bending their legs and lowering their rump to the floor, not of being in the static posture of, well, sitting. So, by the time you get around to praising their sit, several crucial seconds have passed, and in the world of training, those seconds might as well be eons. The behavior is already done and Fido’s mind has moved on to other things. This leads us to the second problem which is, you guessed it, repetition. Fido is already sitting and they just heard you say “sit” again! At best, they will ignore it and only tune you out half the time when you give them the cue in the future. At worst, you have just muddied the waters on a cue that your dog had a pretty good grasp on.
Did the human just ask me to ‘sit’ again? But I already did that! How can I do it from here with my butt already on the ground? Maybe I’ll try the ‘down’ thing and see if that’s what they want.
Absolutely praise your dog for their success, but be very mindful of how you do so.
As part of my own training, I record a video of the training sessions with my dogs – not every single day, but at least a few times a week. I especially make a point of it when we are working on something new or when we feel stuck and are not progressing like I would like. Very, very rarely do I show these videos to anyone else! More importantly, they allow me to look back over our sessions and catch my own mistakes. I fumble gestures, I drop treats, and yes, I even repeat cues. Without the ability to rewatch the session using video, I never would have caught my mistakes and been able to make myself more conscious of doing it correctly the next time. When you are practicing on your own, you must hold yourself accountable.
3) Say What You Mean and Mean What You Say
Dogs don’t understand homonyms.
Do you understand homonyms? They are words that have multiple meanings.
Come for the dog training, stay for the grammar lessons.
Here’s a typical scenario: I come to a client’s house for a consult. Their dog is very sweet, but young and boisterous. As I walk in, I am greeted by a good-naturedly frazzled owner and an exuberantly cheerful adolescent pup. When we sit down to talk, said pup immediately launches themself into my lap.
“Oh, no! I’m so sorry; they’re always like this with new people,” the owner apologizes. “Down, Fluffy. C’mon, get down!”
Fluffy, of course, is busy tapdancing on my head and not paying their owner the slightest bit of attention, but between the two of us we convince them to put all four feet back on the floor.
Over the course of our conversation, Fluffy bounces over to visit me a half a dozen times. Eventually, the novelty wears off and Fluffy is no longer dancing but draped across me.
The owner, of course, is horribly embarrassed that the dog is misbehaving in front of the dog trainer.
“Fluffy, get down.”
Fluffy is flopped in my lap and not going anywhere.
“Don’t worry about it,” I reassure the client. I prop my clipboard on Fluffy’s back. “What sort of tricks have they learned?”
“Well, ‘sit’ and ‘lay down’ and ‘come’ – but only when they feel like it! – and they go in the kennel to sleep.”
“When you ask them to lay down, is that the word you use?”
“Yes. Sometimes I have to use a treat though.”
“Yep,” I say. “They want to pop right back up don’t they?”
“Exactly!” the client says.
“So when you want them to lay down you say ‘lay down’ but when they jump up on my lap and you say ‘get down’ they don’t understand the difference in what you want,” I add.
The client sits there and stares at me like a bump on a log for a second. Then the lightbulb goes on.
Fluffy, lying on my lap like a good dog, wags their tail.
A little oversimplified perhaps, but I assure you that I have a variation on this conversation at least once a week. Dog training is hard enough; don’t over complicate things by making one cue have two meanings or giving a behavior two different names! I often print out a vocabulary chart for my clients and tell them to stick it on the refrigerator. This is especially true if there are multiple people in the household. Dogs are amazingly adept at picking up on different cues from different people, but it always seems to be the most annoying habits that they learn the fastest and remember the longest. Consistency is key.
A lot of dog training relies on repetition. You’ve got to do your homework, after all. But the repetition must have a purpose. Above all, you must remember that dogs are dogs and even though we are teaching them verbal cues, we are not teaching them actual language. Expecting them to learn in the ways that we intuitively expect them to will only lead us down a path of frustration. From the dog’s perspective, all human speech is irrelevant simply because it is so often repeated. It is our job to make specific cues worth listening to.
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