Nicco brought up a really interesting issue in this post – Nice Dog Training – When Did Being Nice Become Bad?.
Here is what Nicco said –
Nothing wrong with being nice to people and dogs. Being the educated dog owner that you are though, I’m sure you’re aware that there are certain things people do that we consider respectful to one another but don’t have the same meaning to dogs. These are things like allowing your dog on the couch or your bed without your permission, letting the dog rush out the door before you, giving in to a dog’s persistent demand for attention, moving out of their way instead of making them move out of YOUR way, etc, I could go on forever.
The dog may not be trying to dominate your household, but what we see as being “nice”, the dog sees as winning small battles. A training book I read called “Training the Hard to Train Dog” describes these battles as small points that the dog wins. The more points he wins, the more control he gains over the house. Again, it may not necessarily be a dominance thing, I think it’s more of a survival thing. If this were nature, he would be exploring all of his resources to maximize his chances of survival.
So the point of my rant is, it’s great to be nice to a dog, so long as it’s fulfilling for a dog and not indulging him. Again, being the responsible owner that you are, I’m sure you’re not letting your dogs run wild around the house, but there are certainly owners who make the mistake of being “nice” in human terms, and they’ve lost control of their dog.
I think Nicco brings up some really important and interesting points within dog training.
1. All dogs need some discipline and structure
A dog owner should have sufficient control over their dog so that the dog does not become a danger to himself and to the people and animals around him.
2. What rules to institute with your dog?
Some dog owners do not allow their dogs up on furniture. I also have the no-getting-on-furniture rule for both my dogs. One of my dogs is a three-legged dog and I do not want her stressing her joints from furniture jumping.
My other dog, the Shiba Inu, likes getting into mischief, and frequently causes some kind of chaos when he gets onto furniture. Therefore, the no-furniture rule is a good way to curb his inappropriate behaviors.
However, not all dogs need this rule. I have seen dogs who get on furniture and behave like a perfect Lassie. I think the important thing is to tailor your rules to fit your dog’s needs. We should be consistent but flexible.
3. Battles and winning points
Finally, this whole notion of battles and winning points is also very interesting.
Personally, I do not see interaction with my dogs as a series of battles. Rather, I see us as working together to achieve a lifestyle that suits us all.
For example, my Shiba Inu likes playing with my other dog inside the house. I let them do this in most areas that are dog safe. However, they are not allowed to play on the stairs for safety reasons.
When they do that, I tell them to stop. If they do, they get rewarded. If they don’t, play stops until they cool down.
With dogs it is almost all about shaping behavior and communicating with them in a consistent manner so that they can understand you. If play always stops when they rough-house on the stairs, then they will naturally stop playing on the stairs because that gets them bad results.
There are no battles – instead, there is a cooperative learning process. There is no winning and losing, because by working together, everybody wins.
I only control and manage my dogs as much as is necessary to ensure that they can live a good, happy, and long life – this includes taking their safety and health into consideration.
When my dogs win and are happy, I win and am happy too.
Sometimes, I also indulge my dogs by giving them a lot of tummy rubs and yummy healthy chicken. I don’t think there is anything wrong with indulging a dog – that for me, is part of the fun of dog ownership.
I think problems only arise when dog owners do not communicate with their dogs properly – i.e. they reward the dog for inappropriate behaviors, and do not communicate to the dog what is desirable and what is undesirable.
Mis-communication, I believe is at the root of almost all bad dog behavior. The other part has to do with not fulfilling the dog’s needs.
This whole notion of winning and losing, I believe, is unnecessary and creates an antagonistic relationship with our dogs. Ultimately we create the strongest bonds with our dogs by working cooperatively with them to achieve common goals.
lol calmassertiv, why does it always have to be all or nothing?
I do not hold Victoria Stilwell up to be a paragon of virtue nor do I hold Cesar Millan up to be some kind of devil. There are many of Cesar Millan’s techniques that make sense and I have written about them. There are also many of Victoria’s methods that make sense and I will use those as well.
I have always pointed out that Victoria Stilwell uses aversive techniques with her clients and that ends up not working well most of the time. I would like to see someone who uses positive on dogs and positive on people – but perhaps that does not make for good t.v.
What I support is not Victoria, Cesar, or Brad. What I support are my dogs – and I will always try to learn as much as I can, so that I can always do what is best for them.
I have said this before and will say it again, just because there are some things we disagree with does not mean we have to reject the whole thing, and just because there are some things we agree with, does not mean we have to accept the whole thing. Evaluate it on a case by case basis – nobody is all good and nobody is all bad. 🙂
I have also written about medicating dogs –
Dog Medication – A Magic Pill for Dog Behavior Problems?
I just watched the latest Victoria Stillwell episode. A mom had let her little chihuahua’s behavior degenerate to where it had bitten her two-year-old daughter and Stillwell said if the dog were bigger she would have had it killed in response. The positivist heroine’s true colors come out — if you don’t know how to fix the behavior, just kill the animal and be done with it. Blaming the mom’s irresponsible no-discipline behavior doesn’t even occur to her.
Later in the same episode she brought in a vet to lend the air of medical science to her desire to drug the people’s other dog, one that was suffering from a simple separation anxiety. Apparently if you don’t know how to fix a behavior but you can’t justify killing the dog Stillwell’s solution is to just drug it. Pathetic.
The sad thing is some people (shibashake) watch this woman and think she has a clue, and some percentage of those watching will hear her recommendations on the show and decide that they should kill Their little chihuahua or drug Their other dog because they saw the kind and gentle positivist recommend it on TV. Fans of Cesar Millan bemoan the incompetence of this self-righteous hypocrit and hope people now see her for what she really is — a fraud.
The whole episode was preceded by a snooty public-service-anouncement-style snippet where she sits in her living room and proclaims that dominance theory has been disproven by ‘recent scientific studies’ and that Her way, the Positive way, is The way to go. Well, I for one am ‘positive’ that the chihuahua did not need to be killed and the other dog did not need to be drugged. The empress has no clothes, and it’s an ugly picture indeed.
Nah, no need to remove this blog. My name’s not even Nicco, that’s my dog’s name.
It sounds to me like we’re describing the same rose, only difference is that I’m cautioning about the thorns and you’re focusing on how beautiful the petals are. I’m always fascinated at how two people can see the world so differently, just like dogs, and that’s what makes the world so interesting.
When I do a body block, I see myself “winning” at that particular time. It’s not an environment of competition to me, I too want an environment of cooperation, but I view the body block as a temporary battle before I encourage cooperation. Maybe it’s a guy thing, I don’t know. I didn’t originate the point idea, but I do agree with it because I observe it in dogs. Take it up with Peggy O. Swagger, author of “Training the Hard to Train Dog” if you want to dispute it.
We certainly don’t want to humanize our dogs using human ideas like “revenge poop” or “he won’t outside poop because he hates me.” But I don’t think the notion of winning/losing is human, competition is everywhere in nature.
Hello Nicco,
I hope you will choose to feel honored because you brought up a very interesting topic of discussion and my intent was simply to attribute the origin of that good topic back to you 🙂 I also apologize if it seemed like I was singling you out in particular. I was only discussing the issues in general terms and did not mean it as a personal response. If you would prefer that I remove this blog post, then please let me know, and it shall be done.
As for winning, losing, and privileges, those are very human notions, I feel. A danger of considering dog behavior in these terms is that it may cause some people (not you) to take what their dogs do personally. This is where things like vengeance poop, he chewed on my shoes because he hates me, he dug up my roses because he doesn’t love me anymore, he did it to take revenge on me for leaving him alone, he did it just to make me lose, etc. come from.
This may in turn cause anger, and/or inappropriate responses such as pushing a dog’s nose into his own poop.
As described above, with dogs, it is mainly all about behavior and shaping behavior. If we think about it as such, we are less likely to overlay human emotions onto our dog’s behaviors, and can better view things from their point of view. All we need to do is consistently communicate to our dogs what are inappropriate behaviors by taking away a resource and what are appropriate behaviors by giving them a resource.
As you say, all dogs *do need* rules, boundaries, and routines. This is not because we cannot let them win more points or more privileges, but because it is the best way to keep them safe, and give them a good quality of life in our very human world.
Even in our relationships with family and friends, I feel it is best to leave out winning, losing, and points. If my partner did the dishes tonight, and I didn’t, I suppose in a way I win and my partner loses. But, another way to view it is that my partner is doing something positive for me because he cares, and I should do something in return to show that I care. Rather than creating an environment of competition with winning, losing and points, what we frequently want to encourage is an environment of cooperation.
Anyway, this is just my opinion 🙂
Well said.
I’m not sure whether I should feel honored or offended that you singled out my post, whatever the case I always enjoy reading your ideas.
I agree with you, I don’t see my relationship with my dog as a series of battles either. I don’t think he sees me as his adversary either, otherwise he would be trying to kill me instead of trying to please me. Lets be honest though, there are times when your dog wants something not in line with your better judgment. By stopping his behavior in its tracks, you are in effect “winning” a battle. You’re letting your dog know that you call the shots.
For example, if we’re out on a walk and I notice my dog fixating on a squirrel I either turn the other way or simply ignore his attempts (depending on where the squirrel is), keep my head up high and continue walking. Once he returns to my side I may decide to click and treat to let him know being by my side is a better alternative. If I allow him to pull me to the squirrel, then he wins and might quickly learn he can pull me anywhere he wants to go.
Another example is this – when we first got our dog we instituted a no couch and no bed rule. Every time he tried to get on we nudged him off. So there were times the dog would come and put just his head on the couch. At first we were like, “oh how cute, he wants us to pet his little head.” Before we knew it, he had his front paws on the furniture and was trying to get on. What started as a seemingly benign behavior, putting his head on the couch, was actually him seeing how far he could push his boundaries.
Perhaps battles is not the best term to describe it as. I think the book actually describes them as privileges. The author describes it as the dog assigning point values to these privileges. The more points he racks up, the more privileges he gets. Pretty soon the dog has full control over something. This is how dogs become food aggressive, possessive over toys, possessive over his favorite couch. What starts as cute, benign behavior which the owner allows because he is “nice”, can actually be the dog trying to set his own agenda.
It’s not all about how the owner sees their relationship with their dog. The owner has to be responsible and try to understand the world through their dog’s eyes. The way I see it, there are times when I do have to “win” a certain battle to ensure the safety and continuity of all involved. I don’t think my dog is ever too upset that I don’t cater to his every whim, in fact I think it calms him down to know that I am in charge of the situation.
Hello calmassertiv,
You bring up a really good and important topic. Give me a bit of time to carefully go through your links. I will probably write something up about it, but it occurs to me that since you came up with the topic and did all this research, you should do the writing, get the Kudos, and everything else that comes with it 🙂 HubPages is a pretty good place to start writing for. Another possibility is Squidoo.
Another great article, this one about how shelters are turning away people from adopting dogs instead of encouraging people to adopt dogs, thus increasing the number of dogs they ‘have to’ kill because they are ‘out of space’. Very enlightening.
http://btoellner.typepad.com/kcdogblog/2009/07/the-yin-and-yang-of-no-kill-over-the-4th-of-july-weekend.html
I noticed that Hubpages didn’t underline the Santa Clara Animal Control link properly, so you may need to put the last part into your browser by hand to get there.
I looked at the stats again and realized one more thing. Every single dog submitted by owners for euthanasia was grouped as Untreatable and killed. If you want them to kill a perfectly good dog, it doesn’t matter how good a dog it is, they kill it if you say so, 100% of the time, apparently no questions asked. Don’t like your neighbor’s barking dog? Remove its dogtags and take it to our local shelter, and they’ll kill it for you. Lovely.
I was doing a little doggie surfing and came across this article discussing temperment testing of dogs:
http://www.pgaa.com/tempermenttesting.html
The disturbing point I got out of it was that shelters are faking their kill statistics in order to get money from a place called maddie’s fund.
So I went to maddie’s fund’s site and they seem like a well-meaning place working towards killing fewer dogs, certainly a good thing on its surface. I then went to my local shelter’s site and got back into disturbed mode. Listed for Santa Clara County are the statistics that maddie’s fund requires them to generate in order to get the $20,000 grant they received, and one can plainly see that they are bogus statistics, just like the first article said they would be.
http://www.sccgov.org/portal/site/acc/agencychp?path=%2Fv7%2FAnimal+Care+and+Control+(DIV)%2FAnimal+Shelter
The dogs are grouped into Healthy, Rehabilitatable, Manageable, and Untreatable. They have 0 dogs in the middle two categories! In other words, they put all the dogs they kill into the Untreatable category so as to be able to claim they don’t kill Rehabilitatable or Manageable dogs. Just like the first article said, they have some bozo ‘temperment test’ the dog, and if bozo doesn’t like the dog, it’s Untreatable, killed, and bozo’s boss applies for money claiming they don’t kill Treatable dogs. Argh!