The journey with a dog isn’t always a smooth one. Between bringing a puppy into your home, right up to caring for a senior dog, there are trials and tribulations along the way.
Whether it’s working with a puppy who is a blank canvas, biting you every 30 seconds, and has the attention span of a goldfish. Or, adolescent dog who’s hormones are all over the place and has began to push the boundaries of what they can get away with. It’s understandable to get yourself stressed out and question why on earth they’re being a nuisance and causing you trouble.
It’s so important to remember that most undesirable behaviour in dogs is self-rewarding. Reacting at another dog to create space, growling over a bone to prevent it from being taken, not recalling from playing with another dog, pulling on the leash to get to the park faster. All self-rewarding behaviours and ways for the opportunistic canine to improve their situations.
Before you get yourself stressed out and pissed off at how your dogs behaving, you need to ask yourself a very important question… Have you actually TAUGHT them what you want them to do and what not to do? Or are you just EXPECTING them to figure it out?
By reinforcing great decisions you love, and correcting bad decisions you don’t love, you can help your dog to steer and navigate through difficult scenarios and environments and really guide them towards being the version of themselves you want to see. They aren’t going to do it alone, they need you all the way.
Stop getting mad at your dog for not doing what you haven’t even taught them! You need to establish some fundamental skills that they can understand and use when they need them, before asking them to make complex high resolution decisions.
Without a solid foundation you’ll have trouble creating anything of real value, so don’t try to run before you can walk and ask things of your dog that you yourself don’t even have the solutions to.
