Welcome to dog behaviour
Good Dog Behaviour Article
This is a selection made from among articles on Good Dog Behaviour. For a permanent link to this article, or to bookmark it for future reading, click here.
Consistency & Persistence Pays Off When Training Your Dog
from:If the rules change from day to day, the dog becomes confused. He needs to know how to consistently earn reward and avoid punishment or he will give up responding. The good trainer is consistent and always uses the same command for the same behavior. Most dog owners teach the dog that the command "down" means to be in a prone position. Unfortunately, many dog owners use the same command to mean, lie down, remove thyself from the couch or bed, or stop jumping on people. When a command has many different meanings, the word ceases to have an important message.
Give each behavior its own command. The command "off" can be used to mean paws on the floor, and "down" may remain to define the prone position. After you decide on consistent commands, the next step is to be persistent in using them. Dogs are naturally good at persistent behavior, and even better if rewarded for it.
Many a dog owner has given up trying to correct the dog that barks all day or jumps on people. Dog owners drop out of obedience classes all the time because they are worn down by their dogs' seemingly persistent behaviors, and they give up trying to teach their dogs new behaviors. The key is that the owners gave up, and the dogs learned that persistence pays off. When an owner gives in, the dog's persistent behavior is strengthened and reinforced. Any determined dog owner can wear the dog down. Therefore, it is extremely important that you be more persistent than the dog about continuing the training process until the dog performs the desired behavior.
The dog must learn that the energy he spends engaging in undesirable behavior is not worth the effort, because you will persist. If you correct him for jumping up the first four times and don't correct him for the fifth jump up you simply teach him to jump up five times for the payoff. Similarly, if you correct the dog for barking at the moon sometimes and not at other times, you teach him that sometimes barking is acceptable and sometimes it is not. The dog will continue to bark to determine when barking is acceptable and when it is not acceptable.
Consequently, correcting barking sometimes actually encourages even more barking. If you don't correct the dog for barking in the backyard because you are not at home, he will learn that barking is acceptable when you're away. If you sneak out of the house so as not to cue him that it is acceptable to bark, he only needs to bark twice with no correction to figure out that you are not at home. A behavior will be extinguished or changed only if you persist in correcting the dog every time he misbehaves.
Good Dog Behaviour News
Our obsession with crime is crushing our freedoms - Guardian Unlimited
The story of Milly, an eight-year-old cat who disappeared out of window in Whitstable two weeks ago, has much to tell us about the petty-minded forces that have come to replace proper policing in this country. Her owners, Stephen and Heather Cope and ...
Read more...Bag slave - Times Online
Apparently, the It-bag moment is officially over. You still need a sharp handbag, but you don’t need to know its name or get it shipped from overseas, where the waiting list is three months shorter. I know this, but the trouble is, nobody has told ...
Read more...Tears, tiffs and triumphs - Guardian Unlimited
The first judges were Rebecca West, Stephen Spender, David Farrer and WL Webb, at that time literary editor of the Guardian. We were handsomely treated: in London we haunted Bertorelli's, but we spent more than one weekend at Michael Astor's ...
Read more...Virginia Ironside's emotional rescue - Belfast Telegraph
My five-year-old son has a best friend who often comes round for tea or a sleepover. My problem is his mother, who asks my son back in return. I am nervous of letting him go. She has a large ‘tame' dog and the children are allowed to roll around ...
Read more...Drug dealer who threatened to cut off woman's breasts jailed for six ... - Edinburgh News
A DRUG dealer who held a woman hostage and threatened to cut off her breast was today jailed for six years. Ivy Brown told his victim to pick a rib for him to stab and then pretended to hold a gun in her mouth during a three-hour ordeal at a flat in ...
Read more...