Ever since that fateful day in 2001 when I realized just how wrong I was about dogs, there is one thing that I remind myself on an almost daily basis. I am not an expert on dogs and training. Don’t get me wrong, I have read dozens of books, attended classes with some of the best in the animal training business, and I’ve achieved some noteworthy accomplishments with my dogs. But by and large, all of the most important lessons I have learned about dogs and training with them came from the dogs themselves and not from people.
In a way, it’s almost a handicap that we consider ourselves “smarter” than our dogs. We are convinced that we understand our dogs, their thoughts and motivations, as well as we understand our own human minds. I’ve come to learn that our dogs are plenty smart but in some critically different ways from our human understanding of intelligence. Nothing has brought this home to me more than my experiences in learning a new way of working with my dogs over the past decade or so.
My dogs have taught me plenty. Not just about their own behaviour and learning potential, but about things to which I had only given passing consideration. Are humans effective communicators, skilled at both sending and receiving messages with our dogs? Are we good at understanding how our dogs view their world? Does it matter to us how our dogs feel about their world and their lives with us? Most of all, I was surprised what my dogs taught me about myself.
I’ve learned to listen to my dogs. They have a lot to teach if I’m willing to listen. Here are three important lessons my dogs have taught me over the years.
“Hey Big-Brain, I don’t get it!”
There are hundreds of books out there offering thousands of ways to teach your dog any number of behaviours. There are systems, methods, approaches, techniques, and exercises all carefully thought out and detailed to help you train your dog. Yes, carefully thought out and detailed by big-brained humans who think they know how a dog will respond to their instructions. Sometimes they are right and sometimes they are wrong. It depends on a lot of things; the author’s skill at writing out the process, the trainers ability to execute the process, and the dog’s ability to understand what their trainer is trying to communicate.
The truth of it is that some of the best detailed and sensible training approaches I have tried with my dogs have been almost completely ineffective. Why did they fail? Because human reasoning doesn’t apply all that well to canine intelligence. As much sense as these training approaches made to me, it just didn’t translate to my dog. It wasn’t for lack of trying. I was often meticulous in making sure I had done the prescribed techniques as intended. They just didn’t mean what I thought they should mean to my dog.
In these situations, I often had to play “Trial and Error” with my dogs to see what they would understand best. Frequently what worked was stripping away all of the cleverness and complexity and just teaching the behaviour in small, simple steps. I had to resign myself to using the things my dog understood rather than the things I thought they should understand.
Lesson learned: The dog will tell us what works and what doesn’t. It doesn’t matter how much we paid for that book or that expert technique or how much sense it makes to US!
“Yeah, ok. But WHY are we doing this?”
Motivation is something that comes up in a lot of dog training discussions. It’s important to know what motivates your dog and to work on building enthusiastic performance. But on a day-t0-day basis, it can be easy to lose track of motivation in our desire to train our dog. I can’t think of a better example of this than the practice commonly known as “proofing” a behaviour. Trainers will cue a behaviour to see if the dog will offer that behaviour under a variety of different conditions and in different situations,
The concept of “proofing” is important to a dog learning to generalize a behaviour. Unfortunately, due to the fact that many times this “proofing” is unplanned and becomes a test under novel conditions, there is either no way to reward the dog appropriately for good performance or we need to reprimand them for non-compliance in a situation that might be confusing for them.
I call this the “What the heck was that?!?” contingency. From my human perspective, I am trying to teach my dog to respond. But from my dog’s perspective, it can often seem like a pop quiz that she may or may not be ready for. “Why are you asking me to sit while we are playing ball?” It’s a reasonable question. And unless you have a good training plan that helps the dog understand why you are doing what you are doing, their confusion at our human motives can be counter productive to our training.
Lesson learned: Make sure the dog knows that they are being asked to respond to us and that it’s worth their while to try. If we don’t, the next time they may just ignore us.
“Make up your mind, champ! What exactly is it you want from me?!?”
We’ve all done it. I am approached by a friend and their dog at the park and I begin trying to get my dog to “behave.” Then comes the stream of cues – “Sit! Sit! Fluffy! Off! Knock it off! Down! (Oh, hi Susan…how’s it going?) I said OFF! SIT!” All the while I am shifting positions, yanking on the leash, trying to maneuver my dog. Meanwhile, my dog is in overload mode. Physical and verbal cues are flying at her like snow on a windy winter day. And like that snow, most of those cues are flying right past her without making the least bit of difference.
Many times, we know what we want from our dog but we can’t be bothered to slow it down to their pace and just focus on them to help them understand. Our busy human brain tries to multi-task and fit in our dog management with the other stream of things going on with us. But our dog is only doing one thing – trying to figure out what we’re asking them to do. If we’re not clear about that, we can make their job impossible. It’s an important lesson that it took me a while to learn.
Lesson learned: Focus on the dog and give them information in a way and at a pace they can handle.
The Dog’s Eye View
All of the lessons my dogs have taught me (and there are many more than just these three) have helped me to understand that my dogs don’t view the world the same way I do. There may be some similarities but there are certainly differences. My dog’s brain is smaller than mine and it functions a little differently. Their senses play different roles than mine do and they are tuned to different priorities than mine are. We just don’t see, hear, sense, and think about things in the same way.
They have taught me that it can be all too easy to get caught up in my own human cleverness as I decide how best to train them. For all of my clever planning and careful reasoning, I can be wildly off the mark when it comes to communicating with my dogs. It is their patience and willingness to forgive my mistakes that allows me to learn from them and to hopefully do a better job each time we work together.
Ultimately, my dogs have taught me that if things don’t go the way I planned during training the best thing I can do try something different next time to make them more successful. I have heard it said that the definition of “stupidity” is trying the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Well, I used to be a “stupid” dog trainer. Thanks to my dogs, I’m getting a lot better.
Until next time, have fun with your dogs!
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Photo credits –
Lessons – Tal Atlas 2009 from Flickr
Confused – Quinn Dombrowski 2009 from Flickr
Hazel – stacia lynch 2011 from Flickr
After reading this article again, I see that my dogs have taught me many of the same lessons. Some of them I recognized and some that I didn’t. Thanks for the clarity.
We are working with a behavior and training protocol that has identified (at least) 4 things that dogs are interested/motivated/concerned by and about. They are: Feeding, Walking (the migration), Greeting, and moments of perceived danger. In the context of those four fields we follow the behavior protocols developed by “A Fresh Perspectives Dog Training” in Rio Rancho, NM. Google them, it’s an interesting read and they recently published a book on their story and methods.
What a great post. I’ve discovered we need to train our dog according to their temperament and characters. Bob for example is a people person, that’s it. He will sit, mind, play with everyone but don’t ask him to work. Ellie, a collie loves to work and so takes to training in a second. I think we have to be flexible above all.
It felt like you read my mind. I have similar thoughts but never got down to write them. Nicely written!
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Fellow Dog Trainer
What a great article – I will share it with my daughter – her dog sure could use some training – last time I visited it stepped on my computer – and it’s a big dog!