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Permalink Reply by MagnoliaFly on November 14, 2008 at 3:45pm

I have to say I disagree with a few of the points made in this article as a dog trainer:

Dogs do not organize themselves in a pack structure like wolves do. You can read about this in the study “The Social Organization of the Domestic Dog; A Longitudinal Study of Domestic Canine Behavior and the Ontogeny of Canine Social Systems”

http://www.nonlineardogs.com/SocOrgDomDog.html

The second is to manually enforce a command if the dog doesn’t do it or “be consistant” to the point of sticking with it until they do. The first problem of doing this is giving the dog a million chances to do a command creates a problem of them remembering they got rewarded no matter the amount of time it took to do a command.

This problem can be avoided by practicing using “one cue” and if the dog doesn’t do it the first time (assuming they completely understand what the cue means and the behavior you are asking for), you remove the reward or give the reward to someone or something else. Dogs realize when the reward is taken away or given to another animal/human and will remember that next time. We use this type of reinforcement constantly in our training to motivate our dogs and help them realize they don’t have a million chances to do something.

Manually forcing the dog to do a behavior creates a new type of cue which can become a problem later in training. If the dog learns to wait for a manual or molding cue from the human instead of doing it on their own, you just lost the effectiveness of your verbal or visual cue. You may also create negative associations with that cue if the dog is continually forced into position. Doing the exercise described above by removing positive reinforcement works best and creates a new motivation with the dog.

Just my two cents :)

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Permalink Reply by Wendt Worth Corgi's on November 14, 2008 at 6:02pm

I tend to disagree w/your first statement on dogs do not organize themselves in a pack like wolves do. The reason I am disagreeing w/you on that is out of my 7 Corgis I can tell you the ranking on each one and the head honcho here is Rhiannon. They will follow her lead, no one picks on her and she will be the one that jumps in to discipline any of the others who get out of line. When I say jump in, she doesn't attack, but then again she doesn't need to since they all bow down to her. She is the one w/one single bark gets all the other ones to join in and alarm us of something even if there is nothing but because Rhiannon said there was or she thought there was the rest follow suite.

As far as your explanation on the training and how to handle commands whether obedient or not is good. There are many views on training practices and though one practice works for one it may not with another. I have worked w/horses for many years and there are many techniques out there even amongst trainers. Not every trainer can use the same techniques entirely as someone else. The main point is to have a general guidance on the right way and the wrong way. I am not one who likes to reward for non compliance to a command but part of learning is to get them to understand that command. In all training practices there are different guidelines depending on the age of a dog and the time spent on it or the acceptance of doing the command. I also feel that consistency is very important and must be done regularly not randomly w/many days off.

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