theTrainingFamily

By Jeff Murphrey, Canine Country Club, MyCanineCountryClub.com

Training the family dog is at least as much about training the family as it is about training the dog. If trained behaviors are not consistently and properly reinforced by all family members, then at best training or behavior modification goals will be realized much more slowly, or at worst the desired behaviors will either never take hold or the dog will develop a different set of rules for different family members.

Be Smarter Than The Dog

A client once told me that I often used the phrase “number one rule of dog training”, but insert different rules depending on the circumstances. Thus, at times the number one rule was consistency, or timing, or patience, and so on. All true, but none of those are the real number one rule which is: you have to be smarter than the dog.

Being smarter than the dog means a lot of things including recognizing that training is really just a means to form a desired habit. If dogs could talk and you could ask an older perfectly potty trained dog: “Why do you always pee outside?” He would probably look puzzled and reply: “because I always pee outside”. What we call potty training is really just the formation of a habit best achieved by using a crate to prevent the dog from having the opportunity to relieve himself inside the house. Think of it as an agreement between you and the dog about how you are going to do any number of things like: waiting until released to jump out of the car or go through an open door, or not jumping in order to get attention, etc. Creating a desired habit in the family dog requires shared habits by the human members of the family.

Let’s examine the last example: the family dog jumps on all the family members when entering the home. Being smarter than the dog requires figuring out what the dog is trying to achieve with this behavior. Odds are, he does it to get attention; and, from his perspective it is 100% effective - either he gets positive attention (petted) or negative (pushed away) - either way he gets attention and his method has become a habit. The fix? Teach him a new, more desirable (from the human perspective) habit to get the attention he craves. If he stays on all four feet, you pet him even more than before. If he leaves his feet, then you disappear back out the door. Wash, rinse and repeat.

So what if one family member does this and the rest doesn't? Best case is the formation of the new desired habit will take longer and will only apply to the one family member that reinforces it, and worst case, the new habit takes so long to form that the family member who is properly reinforcing the new habit gives up.

Family Habits

Put simply, the number one reason (sound familiar?) that training fails is born of unrealistic expectations. A dog is not a car that can be taken to a mechanic and fixed, it is an organism that continues to learn every day - either to maintain newly acquired habits, or to default back to old ones. Consistent and timely reinforcement of the new habits by all family members is the only way Fido will form and retain new habits for all concerned. And that, of course, is the number one rule of dog training.