When Dogs Are Not Listening To You

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What most people call obedience training is actually about learning how to communicate effectively with your dog. And the best part about reframing it this way is that we have lots of ways to improve communication so your dog can actually listen better. 

📧barbara.j.hardman@brighthorse.ie

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:17

So if your dog is ignoring you when you're calling them or lead you on a merry chase while you call them over and over and over and over again and they just they know they want me to come back and they just won't listen, followed by you cursing out their name. We've all seen that video of the dog chasing the deer through the park and the owner chasing after the dog calling their name, and sometimes it can feel like that. Or maybe it's a case that you want to walk on the lead and they're pulling you around like they're your personal trainer and they think you just need an arm day. While well meaning, you know, I really don't need their help to work on my biceps. Or maybe it's a case that your dog just gets some serious airtime while they're jumping up on visitors, strangers, or just even counter-surfing across the kitchen table. And the more you shout, get down, it just seems to mean jump more, jump higher. But you're really not alone. This is something that I come across in my area of work all the time. It's such a challenge, and I'm here to tell you it's not a lack of obedience. I know we want to say that they know what they're doing, they just won't listen. It almost feels like they're doing it on purpose, and sometimes it can really feel like that. But what most people call obedience training is actually about learning and behavior, and it's learning how to communicate effectively with your dog, teaching them a joint language because this might come as a surprise, but they don't speak English. We have to teach them certain words, mean certain things, they don't know what it actually means. The best part of looking at it this way is it reframes it in a way that helps us improve the communication so that your dog can actually listen better. It doesn't involve force or punishment, which means it can stop feeling frustrated by shouting their name or yelling, get down. Ultimately, the secret to good communication is roosted in compassion, clear conversations and communication, understanding, and the beauty of science and training. The word obedience can be really misleading. This because obedience suggests control, compliance, the idea that the dog must do what they're told. But dogs aren't robots and they have their own thoughts, they have their own feelings, and they are sentient beings. Ultimately, they're free-living companions of ours who respond to things in their environment, their emotional state. They need clarity and communication in order to respond the way we'd like them to respond. So if we take a human example, if you're in a long office meeting but you really need the bathroom and you excuse yourself to leave, were you being disobedient for not staying in the meeting? Of course you weren't. You were just responding to a genuine need. When people often hear obedience, they imagine a sort of dominance-based training. Strict rules, harsh corrections, and that ultimately can lead to quite a pressure-filled relationship where both you, as your dog's guardian and owner, feel stressed, and so does the dog. It's not nice for anyone. I don't want to have to impose a load of strict rules on my dog. I would like her to live as a companion in my home. So if we go back to that office example, again, you're in that office meeting, it's going on a bit, you need to go to the bathroom. You stand up to go to the bathroom and someone barks at you, sit back down. You might obey, but you're gonna feel uncomfortable because you still need to go to the bathroom. You might comply and obey that command, but you're gonna feel distracted because you still need to go to the bathroom, and you're probably gonna be pretty resentful with that person. You might be complying outwardly to that command, but your focus and tr on that person and what they're saying and your trust in that person is gonna be damaged. You're gonna feel unsecure and you're gonna be upset. I'm here to tell you that dogs feel pretty much the same way when it comes to training. That's about force rather than communication. So when we look at modern science-based training techniques, it takes a very different approach. Instead of demanding obedience, we focus on cooperation. Our goal is to create a communication with our dog and teach them useful skills in a way that's fair, consistent, and compassionate so that they want to comply that way and live with us as companions. It's not about making them comply at all costs, it's about creating a shared language so they understand what we want and we can understand their needs in return. So, again, if we go back to that meeting example, if you politely ask, can I leave to go to the bathroom? Most decent folks will understand that's communication, everybody knows what we want, and it's a respectful dialogue, and that's what we want to create with our dogs. So rather than dominance-based theories, how do dogs really learn? If they aren't just not listening to me or dominating me, which is completely debunked, how do we create that clear language? So learning and training across all species is referred to as learning theory. Basically, it's the science of how all animals learn horses, dogs, cats, humans, even whales. It's exactly how we've taught them. It tells us that dogs, like people, often repeat behaviors that are reinforced or rewarded. They thrive on predictability, consistency, and when they know what to expect, their stress levels stay low and learning becomes easier, and life just generally runs a lot smoother. Think about how you feel when your daily routine changes suddenly. If you expected to get your paycheck every single month, and then suddenly the day started moving around randomly, that unpredictability would create stress for you. And it's the same with dogs. Consistency helps them makes them feel secure and it opens the door for learning. So if we changed the narrative from don't and stop, and we'll talk about the dead dog and dead man test soon. The principle of these behaviors is really simple. If they're rewarded or reinforced, they're repeated. So if your dog jumps on visitors and then they get a cuddle, they're just going to keep doing it because we've rewarded that dog with cuddles. If, however, we teach them to sit with or all four paws on the ground and then we give them a cuddle, then they will repeat that behavior. This shifts into not stopping unwanted behaviors, rather teaching you better behaviors. This is kind of why we say no and don't and stop isn't behavior. And this is where we come on to the dead man test. So the dead man test or the dead dog test is quite simply a principle of if a dead dog can do it, then it's not a behavior. So for example, a dead dog cannot bark, so we can't train that. A dead dog can't give the paw, play fetch. They're all things we can train. So it's a general rule of thumb of if we're saying no, don't stop, all of those things are not something we can train. Instead, what we want to do is train an alternative behavior that by doing so they don't do the unwanted behavior. So if a dog is jumping on visitors, we can't say stop, down, get down, because we're still giving the dog some form of reinforcement and reward. When a dog has all four feet on the ground, now they're doing a behavior and then we reward it, and by principle, they're also not doing the jumping behavior. So we need to reframe it into what is the opposite that we want the dog to do and reinforce that a lot. So this comes down into our next section, which is the four quadrants. Now, this can be a little bit complex complicated and convoluted, but please do scroll through the blog, you'll see some definitions. I'm going to go through it fairly quickly because it can be a little bit jargony. Ultimately, positive reinforcement is adding something to reinforce the behavior. The positive just means addition, so we say plus, and reinforcement just means we want to make it stronger, like reinforcing a bridge. So it's adding something nice when your dog does the bite thing. Treats, play, attention, whatever it happens to look like that they enjoy. Negative reinforcement, Remy taught is again the mathematical of removing pressure to reinforce and make it stronger. So, for example, if your dog is pulling on the lead and you stop, the tension is on the lead. The minute they stop pulling, the lead tension is removed, and that tells them now we can do something else, and it reinforces loose lead walking. Positive and negative punishment, punishment is to discourage a behavior. Unlike reinforcement, we want the behavior to stop, so we create a punishment either by adding plus or taking something away. So when we add something, this usually involves something adversive. So smacking the dog on the nose, please don't do that, you know, shouting at them, so on and so forth. Negative punishment means going, oh, you kept barking, I'm gonna take away your dinner then. So you're removing something that they want in order to try and stop the behavior. Now, generally speaking, we avoid as much as possible punishment-based methods. Sometimes they happen by accident, sometimes they happen when we're learning and training, sometimes they happen just because we're human and we get frustrated. But so they can happen inadvertently. This isn't a place to shame anyone for doing that. We all lose our temper sometimes. That is just human. However, we don't intentionally integrate it into our training. When we're coming up with a structured training plan, we do our best to avoid punishment at all costs. And if you scroll through the blog, there is some little diagrams in there that hopefully will help you understand those different principles. So, why do I talk about compassion in training and why it works best? So, positive training doesn't just get the result, it does by the way, but it also changes how your dog feels about the situation. And it's really important to know that if you feel good about learning and you enjoy learning, then it makes learning happen faster and it sticks around a lot longer. Now, I'm sure you all remember those horrible classes in school, whether it was primary or secondary school, where you particularly hated a subject. The learning was boring, it was droll, it wasn't exciting. How hard was it to learn that subject? Now, mine were all the languages because I am horribly dyslexic, so any of the language subjects were absolute torture for me. There was no two ways about it. However, I am a very arty person and I love being creative, creative, and I did lots of speech and drama and art. I excelled in those subjects because they were enjoyable for me. My husband loved physics and maths, he's an engineer now, and he was the same. They were his subjects he enjoyed the most. And part of that is I had really fun teachers in that area. They made that learning really fun, you know. And again, my husband said the same. There was a physics teacher who was just amazing and stuck with him, like and he enjoyed that subject. So when we feel good about the learning and we enjoy the learning, it makes learning happen faster and sticks around a lot longer. Now, part of this is because of dopamine. Now, we often think of dopamine as the happy hormone that makes us happy ultimately. It's we always say, ah, dopamine, good bit, good hit of dopamine. Yes, it is a happy hormone, but it's also critical in learning. Now, this comes into a little bit of brain, uh, a little bit of brain. Welcome to my podcast. The striatum and the hypothalamus, and basically the structures in your midbrain require dopamine to help you learn and bank that learning to what I call servers, which is your hind brain. So it's critical to increase that learning. It's part of how your brain knows I need to really remember that. And the way it does that is we're going, this feels really good. Here's dopamine, do not forget this because it's really important, and that's what we're leveraging off if we want to teach something that we want to stick around a long time in our dogs. So ultimately, we're utilizing dopamine through positive reinforcement. Now, there is actually some dopamine that is released through negative reinforcement, and then a little bit that's released through positive punishment and negative punishment, but it's like a sliding scale, right? So if we're trying to teach something new, we want me the highest level of success, right, rather than the lower ones. But it does actually get released a little bit during those processes because it's used in learning, it's just not as high. So, what we want to do is make our dogs or make our dogs give our dogs the opportunity to be more eager, confident, and understand so that they can listen and communicate, and that it's not about obedience, it's about cooperation and understanding what's happening from their perspective so that we can accelerate our learning, and ultimately it's going to make us feel more relaxed, supported, knowing that our dogs are learning in a more kind and effective way. And let's face it, it's it's less frustrating, like we don't want to be frustrated. So, if you look through the blog, there's a few everyday examples of loose-lead walking, recall, and jumping up. They're kind of the three heavy hitters that I see a lot. There's a couple of ways that you can adjust that. You flick through the blog and they explain how you can improve upon them. If you'd like to learn more, there is a free checklist on all of this at the very bottom of the blog. You can sign up today, it will send out a PDF um explaining all the bits and pieces that I've gone through today in a bit more detail and what you can do about it. And then there's a six-day email that'll go out, or is it a six-day email? No, sorry, six emails over every three days. Just following up and expanding on all this. So it is a free resource. I don't spam, promise, and you can unsubscribe anytime at all. Um, so if you'd like to learn more, please do scroll through the blog, you'll see it towards the end of the page. Um, feel free to sign up today or tomorrow or any other day, and you can always unsubscribe. So, thank you so much for for listening to this uh mini podcast. I hope you found it useful. And if you did and you think that somebody else would really benefit from it, there is a share button at the bottom where you can share on all the various socials, or just share this hyperlink with them and they can listen to the podcast, look at the free checklist if it's useful, and read through the blog. So, thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoy the rest of your day, whatever you happen to be doing.