Category: Bringing a New Dog Home

Managing Unwanted Behavior

If you had a friend who was trying to give up chocolate, would you invite them into your house and then eat their favorite chocolate in front of them? If you had a friend who was in the throes of nicotine withdrawal, would you smoke in front of them? For most of us the answers to these questions would be no. Yet we seem to ignore this courtesy when it comes to our dogs and in the process forget about one of the most useful tools in preventing unwanted behaviors— simple management.

Dogs do what works for them. If chewing helps to relieve boredom, stress, teething pain, or simply the need to chew, they are going to grab whatever is available and palatable to them and chew on it. It makes no difference to them if it’s a $1000 pair of Manolo Blahniks (yes I watched Sex in the City) or a ratty, smelly, hole ridden pair of house slippers that a wife has been trying to get her husband to throw out for years.

Teaching our dogs the rules of acceptable behavior is not something that is accomplished in one or two sessions. It takes good instruction, patience, persistence, repetition, and consistency to help establish new behavior. There is one more thing that needs to be in place throughout the teaching of a new, acceptable behavior— management of opportunities to practice the old unwanted behavior.

For our purposes here, management simply means that the dog is not given any opportunity to practice the old unwanted behavior unless you are specifically ready & able to intervene and re-direct the dog towards the appropriate behavior. To some this may seem overly simplistic but it is not an easy thing to practice sometimes. Kicking off your shoes after a hard day’s work is a physical and mental reward for us and it’s something that’s done without our notice; that is until five minutes later when we’ve come back from changing out of our work clothes to find Fido happily relieving his over excitement from your arrival by going to town on those discarded shoes.

One point I would like to make here is that Fido is not to blame in this example. There is no intent behind his actions other than to got some relief or find an outlet for his energy; he simply hasn’t practiced the new behavior enough for it to replace the older hard wired one. Dogs are not devious; they are not willfully misbehaving or being spiteful regardless of how much their actions remind us of ourselves. 

Remember that when we are trying to change a dog’s default behavior, any chance the dog gets to practice the old hard wired behavior without being redirected to the new acceptable behavior prolongs the time it takes to establish the behavior you want. The best way to set yourself and your dog up for faster success when learning a new behavior is to make sure the dog can’t practice the old behavior unsupervised.

Cheers,

Kevin, Jackie, Gavin, Annie, Tosha, Elbee 

5 comments - Posted by Kevin Myers at 3:38 PM - Categories: Behavior | Bringing a New Dog Home | Training

Your First Few Weeks With A New Dog

Since Elbee adopted me almost two weeks ago, I am reminded of just how important our early interactions with a new dog are. After Elbee got a few meals in him, got the medicine he needed, and had some shelter over his head, he become less fearful and more curious about his new home, and a curious dog is a dog that’s ready to learn. This is the time when he is discovering the new environment he finds himself in and how he can interact with it. If I want to establish a pattern of acceptable behaviors with him, NOW is the time.

Each and every reaction I make to any of his behaviors is put away in his memory bank. He becomes aware of how to get those things he wants. For instance, Elbee was very emaciated when I found him and as a result his first couple of days with us we fed him just about every six hours. He was very vocal and very excited at each feeding and who could blame him? After a couple of days he was feeling better but he still was very vocal and over excited at feeding time. But now, instead of putting his food down for him to eat I simply waited for him to sit and be quiet. It took Elbee all of about a minute to figure out that the old rules weren’t getting him any food. You could see him looking at me and trying to work out what was different. In the end he backed up, sat quietly, and was feed. His next feeding he was just as excited, but again I waited and it only took about 30 seconds for him to sit quietly. He is still excited for his food, but it takes him less than 5 seconds or so to sit quietly and wait. I’ve taken the same approach to his tendency to jump. He still jumps occasionally, but all I have to do is back up just a bit and he immediately knows that sitting quietly is the only way to get the attention he wants.

There is really no trick to this. Because it is a new environment for him, he is really open to learning how he fits into it and what is expected of him. A sponge that will adsorb every little piece of information he can. If I take care to encourage and reinforce those behaviors I want, and to ignore those that I don’t want, I am putting money in the bank towards a great relationship with him.

I realize that there is no “one size fits all” solution to all the challenges that you may encounter when you bring a new dog into your home. But keeping these simple things in mind during the initial “break in” period, can go a long way to making your lives together easier and more enjoyable for everybody.

Cheers

Kevin, Jackie, Gavin, Annie, Tosha, Elbee

5 comments - Posted by Kevin Myers at 10:08 PM - Categories: Adoption | Advocacy | Behavior | Bringing a New Dog Home | Dogs | Training