Understand your dog's ancestral instincts to manage his behavior.
After 48 years of working, training, whelping raising dogs, and trying to train their owners as well, I can still see a Huge "lack Of Information and education" at this Present time.
I started training and working with Dogs in the '70s were the Training Methods were completely different and "Strong Compulsion" was the Call of the day to train dogs, Chockers, Incorrectly- WITH LACK OF KNOWLEDGE AND IGNORANTLY used Pinch Collars, Electric Collars, Flanking, and creating so much pressure on dogs to make them do what we wanted them to do.. It was so-called Obedience,...WELL... nowadays, I call it Forced Obedience, they did please us because of Fear, not because they understood or wanted to Please us! Basically, we were mistreating them without really realizing it, for this was the way everyone learned to do it. Not until years later the Training methods started to change and we started to learn there was a Psychological aspect of the way to train to acquire the REAL TOTAL Bond of our Dog and the True honest FABULOUS WORD CALLED ENGAGEMENT! WERE THE DOG HONESTLY AND TRULY DID WANT TO WORK WITH YOU! Wanted to Please you because he enjoyed it as well as felt part of a team, of the Pack, his "Natural Survival Instincts" were being respected and taken into account! NOW WE USE MOTIVATION AND TRY to stay away from all the harsh corrections and techniques, that led our dogs to work in Avoidance
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Not far below the furry surface of your favorite domestic canine companion lurks a mind surprisingly similar to that of its ancestor and current-day cousin, the wolf. We have stretched and molded the dog’s plastic genetic material to create hundreds of widely diverse breeds – from the tiny Chihuahua to the giant St. Bernard – all to serve our whims. But our dogs’ behaviors and instincts to this day closely mirror those chosen by natural selection to ensure the wolf’s survival some 10,000 to 15,000 years ago, when the wild canine was first invited to share the warmth and protection of the fires in our ancestors’ caves.
The genetics that has enabled the dog to become “man’s best friend” comes as both a blessing and a curse. The instincts that drive the behaviors we love in our canine companions are the same ones that make us tear our hair out.
For example, the desire to be a member of a social group, or pack, is what makes the dog so amenable to family life and training. It is this same social instinct that in some dogs triggers incredibly destructive “separation anxiety” behaviors when a dog is left alone, behaviors that include non-stop barking and howling, inappropriate urination and defecation, chewing, and self-destructive escape attempts.
When their behaviors and instincts are understood and properly directed, our dogs are well-adjusted, cherished family members. The millions of dogs that are abandoned at animal shelters in the U.S. every year are tragic testimony to how often we fail to do this. Let’s look at how we can prevent this from happening to your dog.
Ancestral dog Instincts
Dog trainers commonly hear complaints about dogs that bite, attack other dogs, jump up, bark, chase cats, cars, or joggers, are shy, or don’t come when called. All these activities have a basis in normal, instinctive, survival-based canine behavior. They occur in spite of the owner’s training efforts because the dog is rewarded by them in some way.
Fortunately, each behavior can be modified, either by figuring out how to make the desired behavior more rewarding than the undesirable one, or by managing the dog so he doesn’t have an opportunity to exhibit the inappropriate behavior. Traditional training methods have often relied on human logic to teach dogs how to behave, by punishing the dog for “bad” behavior. But in the minds of our dogs, behavior is neither good nor bad; they are just doing what dogs do, driven by instinct and governed by the consequences of their actions. “Good” behavior is learned behavior. They learn more quickly, effectively, and happily, if we focus on rewarding the “right” behaviors, and preventing, or to the extent possible, ignoring the “wrong” ones.
