| Senior Member Working Dog
Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: Tasmania, Australia
Posts: 213
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Based on the info you have provided on your post I wonder if there is some confusion on your dogs part as to the pack order in your home. We as humans like to ideal on leading with fairness and equality, but to dogs this perspective is quite destructive, if you study the dynamics of a pack of wild dogs, therein could lie some answers.
A dog pack, has a very clear leader, who controls the movements of its pack, the alpha is not usually a fighter however leads with a relative aloofness and silent authority.
We can apply some of these pricipals in our own homes with our dogs, I personally have found it to be very successful with Kato, keeping him in line and holding him to the position we expect him to be in the pack, we have done so by not using much physical force or aggressive dominace techniques some may suggest you use.
examples
In the wild, alpha dog controls what food its pack will or will not have, and will give but also take away food that its members if it so chooses.
How to imitate this in our homes? Never feed your dog scraps of the table whilst you are eating, this can be interperated by your dog as an acceptance of an equality. If you do feed table scraps, do so once you have finnished and cleared the table, then put the leftovers in dogs bowl to eat.
You can take this even further by teaching your dog food refusal, we have found it a good tool to use, when needing to remove toys, foodstuff that dog should not have without causing poor reaction from the dog.
Follow the leader, in the wild the alpha is the be all and end all of his packs happiness, fullfillment and safetey. We do not allow our dog to defend us from a perceived threat when out for a walk, if an unkown dog comes by, we make him stand behind us and is the last to meet and greet, same at home with visitors, last to be allowed to say hello.
Taken one step further we often attach Kato to members of the family by a long lead, and will spend the day attached to this family member. What this enforces, a follow the leader scenario, he is forced to go wherever that family member will be, and prevent him from going, at his own leisure or on his own whim. We will follow this exercise from time to time to act as a reminder as to who leads who always enforcing human through door way or down the stairs first.
We dont greet Kato the moment we step in the door when we get home for work, we wait untill his excitement has calmed and that he is ready to sit and behave for his hello welcome home.
Whilst we are away, he has toys like kongs to keep him entertained, toys however like balls or tug ropes that we share with him are witheld until we want to play a game. We work on the rule that we initate game play, we also end game play, If he tries to start a game with us, we walk away and come back a few moments later and begin at our say so. Never play a game of tug unless you win the game.
In the wild, alpha has the most comfortable sleeping spot in the den, same at home, chairs, couches and beds are for humans only.
As far as barking goes to passer bys, there are a few tools that you can use to at lease reduce this. Firstly you do need to detirmin why your dog is barking, what reward is being obtained by doing it. Is it protection? Is it becuase sometimes passerbys will come and say hello? or as so often the case, is it because every time your dog barks at passerbys, that you come out, and growl or bring your dog inside? (reaction by you can be a reinforcement in itself, be it positive or negative reinforcement) Pay attention next time it happens, annalyse critically, what the outside factors are and what your reaction is, you may find that you have unconciusly encouraged barking by your movement and reaction.
As far as recall goes, I would strongly encourage you to enrol at a local obedience school, practice recall on lead as much as possible so you can enforce correction quickly, allowing longer distance as recall improves. It may sound silly, and even be a bit embaressing, but if your dog is not recalling off lead at a distance start running away, making high piched funny sounds, your dog will very quickly want to find out what you are doing and start following you. As the dog is about to hit your heels turn around say come here, and reward hugely.............you just did a long distance recall, with no drama from the dogs perspective just its curiosity getting the better of it, no time to growl or jump, something much more interesting occured.
Time, trial and error will all work in your favour if you committ to it, if what you are doing now does not work, you need to try an alternative until you find something that does.
These are just a few things that we have done and have worked, some you may or may not like to try, its up to you, but I thought I would share our succssful training solutions (in saying that there have been unsucessful ones before some of them, but we got there by changing our perspective and the way we do things)
Good luck with it all.
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"The purity of a person's heart can be quickly measured by how they regard animals" |
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