In this episode Victoria Stilwell helps a couple who have three great Danes. I actually really liked this episode. The couple were willing to do some work and Victoria was actually solving problems.
One thing bugs me, and that’s that although Victoria doesn’t train like Cesar Millan, she’s started talking like him. This has been a common theme on all the episode this year. She says things like your dogs need to respect you and you need to be the leader. You could find a way to make these phrases fit good training, but really dogs don’t have a concept of respect. Basically they respect what gets them good stuff. If you want “respect” from your dog, carry bacon and give it to her. If you’ve seen the movie As Good As It Gets maybe you remember the scene with the dog and the bacon.
I personally don’t believe dogs have a strong concept of a leader, but what concept they do have almost any owner fits. You feed them, protect them, take them to pee and poo and control just about everything. Don’t worry, your dog definitely sees you as a “leader” as much as they have a concept of that. Dogs do “crazy” things for two reasons: they are following their instinct or because they are rewarded for those things (or both).
When it comes to training, I’m getting better. As I learn I see the ways in which I have rewarded some of Kody’s undesirable behaviors. But it can be tricky, because I also see the ways in which my desire not to reward behaviors has backfired.
I can’t totally explain it, but I have recently almost completely extinguished some of Kody’s barking at the slider by rewarding it. Ignoring the behavior, in this case, actually makes it much worse. I’ll tell you exactly what I’ve been doing.
It used to be that Kody would bark at something out back and he would get fixated on it. I knew timeouts would probably work for this, but the behavior didn’t happen often enough to keep a leash on Kody. I had seen my trainer do a type of thing where she rewarded bad behaviors before, so I decided when Kody would bark I would try saying, “What’s going on? Thank you for letting me know.” Then I would walk over to the slider and take a look at what was going on making it very obvious to Kody that I was doing so. We would be there together looking. I would make some positive statements in a positive voice, like, “Oh yes, there’s ducks out there, we like ducks, that’s really great.”
Well, that’s it, and it works. I’m guessing Kody’s instinct was to tell the other dogs or people that there was an intruder. When I ignored him, he felt compelled to continue to monitor the situation. But when I listened, investigated myself, and approved of the situation, he felt the situation was done and could move on. Now when he sees things out back, even squirrels, his behavior is much more mellow, but I’m still sure to take note and thank him.
Okay, I got a little off track, but my point is that Kody’s undesirable behavior was most likely not because he didn’t “respect” me, or because he didn’t see me as the “leader”. It was the opposite of that, and the fact that he was following his instinct. I started acting like Kody expected me to act, and all of a sudden he became comfortable.
Now, while this has worked the honest truth is I’m not exactly sure why. I can guess at Kody’s motivations all I want, but I will never know fully what he’s thinking or feeling. However I can say that in my search to find positive ways of training I am succeeding and both Kody and I are much happier for it.
As for Victoria Stilwell, I don’t know why she’s quoting Cesar Millan while teaching better methods, but just ignore what she says and pay attention to what she does and I think you’ll be better off. This was a good episode.