respect & communication

RESPECT and COMMUNICATION
The information I am going to offer today on communication and respect comes from a Professor of animal behavior, comparative cognition and psychogy, she has studied dogs for years and it’s from the results of numerous tests that these facts are based on.
Respect means the deep admiration for someone’s abilities, qualities or achievements.
Firstly, if you look at the meaning should we demand respect and most important does a dog understand what it is we are wanting.
The answer is no they have no idea what respect is.
We imagine dog’s behavior from a human biased perspective.
We think our dog is happy when we see a smile but remember a smile for chimps means fear, the onus is on us to confirm or refute things like depression, jealousy, sad, anxious or respect.
Imagine using antidepressants on our say so and we called it wrong.
In her studies she found there are 13 different meanings to the position of a tail, that is more than most of us would have thought.
A yawn is not boredom it is the way a dog calms itself down after stress and anxiety, these are just a few things that we may have read wrong in our dog’s behavior.
 
Why is this important to know all this, because it set the scene to the way we train, our reading of a dog will influence what we believe our dog is doing and how we address it, my dog is arrogant, disrespectful, doesn’t listen very hard headed.
These are all our human views on behaviors that could and most likely be wrong.
 
Take chickens, we know battery hens is a big no no, but how much space do they like, when tested with plenty of room to roam they didn’t, most of the time they flocked together, unlike us who love our own space.
What is important to an animal is what they can see, hear, smell, senses that have meaning.
What we need to know or consider is what was proposed by a German Biologist who discovered that anyone wanting to understand the life of an animal must consider their unwelt (oom-velt), its self-world, what life is like as a dog. What things are meaningful to it. Let’s look at an example…
A rose to us is a thing of beauty, represent love, a gift, a flower with a scent.
To a dog, their only interest is if it has been urinated on before or has it got their owners’ scent on it.
In the case of the dog, the most important thing they desire is food, and we already control that so knowing this how do we get training these beautiful dogs so wrong. Simply, we don’t look deep enough at the dog as a species, based on today’s research, and also, we don’t look at them as individuals.
What was tested in these experiments was different ways we trained dogs.
The 2 types of training most used are….
One is wolfism training or the Alpha male, be the boss, demand respect, get a quick solution, complete control, they still love their dogs but do they understand them,
Dogs are no longer pack animals, we don’t have to assert power we have it, we control their most important thing, FOOD.
It has long been proven we own a group of dogs that have a pecking order, not a pack. Packs have a Hierarchy of a breeding pair with younger siblings under. The younger ones often look after the pups, they teach their young to hunt cooperatively, one the one pair can mate, this is nothing like my group of dogs. We can’t be the alpha male in our group. We are human and they are dogs, we need to communicate what we what in a way that they understand, not try to copy what a dog does as if we read it wrong we could be giving the wrong message, remember the 13 different tail movements.
I thought this method was nearly dead and buried till I read FB this week. It overseas many people’s way of training. This constant belief and need to be the boss, to control, to suppress everything, rather than understand.
 
The second is operant or conditioning training, treat based by lured, in other words you are making a dog do what you want in a nicer way but still controlling the choice and outcome.
Both ways you make the decision
 
Neither is correct
The answer lies in the middle
Reward based training, using positive reinforcement which allows the dog to make the decision to do a behavior. This is the best and most proven method of training. This is the way you get a behavior right and a behavior a dog will repeat over and over again.
 
Dogs are keen observers they learn by us showing them, not telling them.
They observe us so much they know us not just by our looks, but by our smell and walk yet we never really study them enough to know them.
They are sensitive to our stress and notice our breathing and tensing of our muscles. They are astute watchers but not mind readers, they can be fooled. When given 3 cups with one food they copied which cup we turned up, the one with food under it. Then when tested again and turned up a cup without food they still picked up the one we tipped up. In other words they copied us instead of relying on their great sense of smell.
Positive training is not all about the rewards and it is not that simply.
You are not demanding a behavior; you are showing them what you want without words, gestures or pulling them. You are helping them make the final choice to do it. It is hard to explain, lets take teaching a boundary. You stand near a bed and look at it, you wait till the dog puts any paw on that bed, you reward quickly and continue until he has decided the best place to get a treat is to be on that bed.
Summing up…
Your relationship is defined by what happens in the undesired moments.
Managed the unwanted and praise the wanted.
Teach first, correct second.
To become a good trainer, you must first be able to understand how to communicate with your dog.
To learn more, enroll in my ONLINE school. Look forward to having you as a student one day!