Dealing with a needy dog can be frustrating.
Today, discover how to ignore your dog’s neurotic behavior.
In this episode, you will learn several specific things your dog does to get your attention.
Show Highlights
- Most dogs are good to hang out with themselves if you have created trust.
- Welcome Leslie to the Family Dog Fusion Team!
- Awareness goes hand in hand with attention.
- Awareness, attention and knowing how to state it in the affirmative.
- Awareness is a daily practice.
- Devin and Bennie shed light on how dog training is just an aspect of your life and how they want you to keep in mind the bigger better picture of your life.
- Dogs do a lot of things to get attention. They want your attention and want to know they are a part of your pack.
- There are many things that dogs do to get attention:
- Steal things
- Tear up the things they stole
- They play the chase game
- They will stare at you
- They can stay underfoot and trip you up
- Put their head or paw on you
- Bark
- Whine
- Attention getting behaviors mainly work because of several things:
- They are cute
- They happen when you are not paying attention
- They feed off of energy or create new energy
- Energy (how a dog can react or create new energy):
- Not only do these behaviors feed off of your energy they also can create and change the current energy of the situation.
- Bennie gives an example of when Tam’s girls (twins) were over for dinner and game night. Sandy was not receiving attention and started to act out by jumping up on the girls and chewing on a flip-flop. Tam had to put the leash back on her and and hold her for awhile.
- Sandy was creating new energy to get attention.
- Once Tam put the leash on her she fed off the energy off Tam.
- Attention (things happen when you are not paying attention):
- The attention grabbing behaviors usually happen when YOU are not paying attention and are not aware you are giving attention to your dogs poor behavior.
- Bennie speaks about when Molly would ride anywhere with him, she would put her head on his shoulder as he was driving and would unconsciously pet her head.
- Once Bennie realized what was going on, it was too late! The habit had already been created when going for a ride.
- Whining is a big Deal – when a dog whines it is like a baby crying.
- Our natural reaction is to calm them down, see what the problem is, or even tell them to be quiet.
- So when a dog does it our firs thought is; something is wrong or we need to calm them down.
- All of these actions from you are attention for the whining behavior.
- At first you give positive, pleasing, soothing attention then later it becomes frustrating and you give negative, loud and angry attention.
- Positive or negative, it is all attention!
- Remember – Attention is PRAISE!
- When you give attention to your dog during or after their behavior you are teaching your dog that is how they are “supposed: to behave.
- Cute!
- It’s OK! We are all humans who love dogs and at one point or another fall into the “cute” trap with your dog.
- This is one of the most challenging things Bennie encounters in his career.
- Bennie talks about a client of his that wanted to work on counter surfing and as they were tempting the dog, Bennie gave a correction and the dog fell over (the dog was not hurt).
- As the dog made the right choices she got the treats, love, and anything else they used as a temptation on the counters.
- Bennie spoke to the husband on their next training and he indicated that they, “just moved everything back far enough so she cant reach it.”
- This is called AVOIDANCE TRAINING!
- When the wife arrived she allowed the dog to jump up on her and gave it lots of love for doing so and fed it something off the counter.
- Every time this dog would do anything other than what we asked the wife would just laugh, look at Bennie, and say, “Isn’t she just so stinking cute?”
- Obviously, this is not how you are supposed to train nor is it being aware of your actions regardless of the “cute” factor.
Homework
- Continue to work on learning to ignore behaviors that are unwanted and can be ignored.
- Listen to the homework in Ep 091 – Dogs that can’t hold their licker – this will help you learn how to ignore behaviors
- In order for you to stop these unwanted behaviors such as whining, you have to learn to be aware of the attention-getting behavior.
- As I touched on in Ep 091, ignoring a behavior is the BEST correction for a dog.
- In the early stages of your dog’s life this is how the momma dog would teach her pups.
- She mainly let them get away with murder because for the most part what the puppy was doing was learning to defend itself and survive.
- If things got out of hand then the momma would step in and break up the fight or as we said in the past pull a dog off the nipple if it was biting too hard.
- These basic instincts for correction were what your dog was taught at a very early age.
- The problem now as the dog has left its littermates, you have been giving attention to all of these unnecessary behaviors.
- Before you can ever learn to ignore, you have to identify what behaviors you want to fix and decide if it is a behavior you can ignore.
- What does your dog do?
- Whine, bark at you, bark in the crate, steal your stuff, jump up when you are seated, nuzzle you or bring you a toy to play.
- If you engage in any of these things, and these are things you engage without even realizing you are doing it, then you are giving attention to those behaviors without even realizing it.
- Your job is to pay attention to your dog throughout this week and write down 5 to 10 things that your dog does to get your attention.
- For example: scratch at the door to go out? Stare at you?, etc
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