Let’s flip it on the head and instead of using the word treat and that you are treating your dog, think of it as paying them for a job well done and that you are just using some of their daily allowance of food. If you start thinking of it this way too, you will prevent your dog from being overweight and there is defiantly too many overweight dogs around as it is!
Now I am also not saying we need to reward every single behaviour, every single time with a treat. But why not pay them for a job well done? I brought most of their breakfast home with me that morning, but I had it there if I wanted to use it and they had some of it back at the van.
What I also found strange about this method is that you are not showing your dog what you want them to do instead, you need to think of dog training with leadership and guidance – you need to guide them to show them what behaviours you want from them and what behaviours you don’t want from them. We all too often spot all the things we don’t like our dogs doing and ignore all the good stuff they do. So if there is something you don’t want your dog to do you need to be showing them what you want instead.
What gets rewarded gets repeated.
With the clapping and shouting (or barking) at your dog is just startling them and isn’t teaching them anything. You won’t be consistent with the timing of when you do it, so you may do it as they get ready for the jump, or when their front feet are about to leave the ground, or when their back feet have left the ground, or when they put their paws on the person or after – there are many times here when you may use the clap/bark so how will your dog know why you are doing it for as it is likely you will do it at some point but not be consistent.
Doing this you are just also interrupting the behaviour you don’t want, but it isn’t going to fix the issue as you are not showing your dog what you want them to do instead.
It’s also not very nice, I don’t want to startle or scare my dogs to a point they are frightened. I am happy to admit that I was advised to use a similar method in the past with my first dog, Tye. Where I was advised by a trainer to squirt him with water when he did something I didn’t like. Yes it worked, it stopped him for that split second, but to what emotional effect it had on him breaks my heart just writing this.
He was so frightened of it and I am not over exaggerating it was awful to see. I used to use a fruit shoot bottle, you know the sort that kids used to have their juice in, it had a sports top on it. Made it easy to squirt water at him, as I was told to do. After using it only a few times, all I had to do was pick it up and he would drop flat to the ground and then slowly come towards me low to the ground, head and ears down. To see him look so frightened of me broke my heart and I stopped using the method, it had never sat right with me and to see him so crushed was enough to stop me using it, I knew it just didn’t feel right. Have you ever had that feeling in the pit of your stomach that it just doesn’t feel right?
Dogs have emotions and they understand emotions, Tye would come to see me when I was upset or if I was crying – he would also happily dance around the kitchen with me when I was happy.
By purposely upsetting your dog whether that be by squirting water at them, shouting at them or making them jump can harm your relationship with your dog, and who wants that?
In the next blog in this series I will tell you what I use to motivate my dogs.
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