In this post, I’m going to tell you about a few of my family’s imperfections. Right now, it’s Saturday morning in our house. I’m about to head off to meet a client and the kids have all gone off with my wife. In our family we keep a clean home. (I don’t tidy that much, but my wife does a great job!) If my wife could see what the house looks like right now, however, I know she’d be upset. There are shoes and clothes on the floor, the kids knocked all the pillows off the couch, and some people left some towels on the stairs. And believe me, it can get worse than it is now! We sometimes get a little sloppy, as I’m sure you do too.
Here in the living room, next to this little bit of a mess, is my dog. She’s young—just over a year old—and she’s a very high-energy dog. A lot of trainers would say would say: “If you don’t want the dog to chew the shoes or steal the headphones, then you have to hide them from her so she can’t do anything wrong.” But we’ve taught this dog that she needs to calmly relax indoors, even if she’d much rather chew on things.
I have a young, energetic dog. Even though this mess will eventually be cleaned up, I’m not worried about it. I’m not worried that if I go into the bathroom to brush my teeth, she’ll chew on the shoes. I’m not worried that if I put my feet up and watch TV, she’ll ruin the headphones.
I’m not worried because I’ve taught her the difference between right and wrong. I know this sounds crazy—why wouldn’t you teach that? But there’s a large movement in dog training that says not to teach your dog right and wrong. Instead, some trainers want you to teach your dog something more right. In other words, clean up all the clothes and shoes immediately and just teach your dog to chew on their bone. Well, I do teach her to chew on her bones. She’s got handfuls of them around somewhere. But at the same time, I need to teach her that it’s not okay to chew the pillows or steal the headphones.
This shouldn’t be a revolutionary thought process, but in today’s dog training environment it is. Some trainers will tell you that if your dog chews on something it’s your fault for leaving it out. Forget that! If you have kids—or just a husband or boyfriend—you know that something will be left on the counter, that shoes will be covering the floor, that there will be items sitting around for the dog to potentially chew. You can’t turn your house into a bare asylum where the only thing your dog could possibly do wrong is pee on the floor. You need to live in your home. So it’s important to reject the silly and childish ideas that are being proposed by a large percentage of the training community.
Even some dog trainers with their own TV shows propose this theory, saying that you should teach a dog what to chew rather than teaching them that chewing is wrong. They say you should teach your dog that sitting on the floor is fun, rather than that sitting on the couch is wrong. or that taking the ball is more right than taking the headphones.
Reject these ideas. They’re silly, and they’re not set up for the way that people live with their animals in the real world. Messes are going to happen, and things are going to be left out. Teach your dog not to screw with your stuff! You can still teach them to chew on their own stuff, but you also need to show the that it’s absolutely wrong to be chewing on yours.
I almost feel silly writing this post because these ideas are obvious to the majority of rational people. So I just want to encourage you to watch the trainers that you’re hiring. A lot of them will try to teach you things that just aren’t true. Happy training!
Leave a Reply