01/10/2023
He thought she (the trainer) would come to his house and fix the dog’s problems, and the duo would live happily ever after without having to change anything he was doing. It doesn’t work that way. You have to change your behavior if you want your dog’s behavior to change.
https://www.facebook.com/173475349443127/posts/4202720059851949/?sfnsn=mo&mibextid=6aamW6
𝗕𝗲 𝗣𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗔𝗻𝗱 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁
A man called me at the animal shelter. He was full of complaints about his dog and the trainer that I had sent to work with him. After each complaint, I explained carefully that the trainer was doing exactly what I would want her to do, and I tried to help him understand by reframing his complaints. He finally said, “You know what really bothered me? She seemed to be spending all her time trying to train me instead of the dog!”
Well, yes. Yes, I’m sure she did. She wanted to make sure that he knew how to handle the dog well, deal with problems as they arose, and resolve the intermittent issues he and his dog were having. He had to learn these skills, but he didn’t pick up on the trainer’s message. He thought she would come to his house and fix the dog’s problems, and the duo would live happily ever after without having to change anything he was doing. It doesn’t work that way. You have to change your behavior if you want your dog’s behavior to change.
A major key to making this procedure work long-term is to commit to making sure that your dog’s new behavior continues working for him. If you start doing this procedure only on occasion, you’ll soon be complaining that CAT didn’t work for your dog. No matter what training procedure or method you take up with your dog, you have to perform it consistently.
There are some tricky things that can happen if you train inconsistently. If you train new alternative behaviors to aggression very consistently, and you reinforce every time the dog performs a good behavior correctly, the dog is going to keep doing good things. If you never reinforce the good behavior again, it’s going to stop happening. If you don’t make the good behavior worthwhile, you will lose the good behavior.
To complicate matters, if the dog exhibits the desired behavior less frequently, he will find something else to do instead, and it will probably be the behavior you didn’t like in the first place. After all, he already knows how to do that. So if you have taught your dog that sitting, turning his head, looking at you, or pulling the other way will result in your moving away from the neighbor on the street, but then you stop giving him his needed escape because you like to chat with neighbors on your walks, he’s going to do something. The most likely thing for him to do is revert to his aggressive responses that worked so well in the past. Hey, I’m on this leash, and this lady scares me. This new stuff Mom taught me isn’t working, so I’m going to snap at the lady. That used to work every time. You’ll have wasted all that work, your dog could injure or anger your neighbor, and you’ll have a lot more work to do to get back up to speed with your dog. This is true with CAT and every other training procedure that you or a trainer might do with your dog. In order to make the procedure work, you have to do the work.
- An excerpt from 𝘛𝘶𝘳𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘍𝘪𝘦𝘳𝘤𝘦 𝘋𝘰𝘨𝘴 𝘍𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘭𝘺 by Kellie Snider
