Reason to Play #3
Play is learning. Play nurtures development and fulfils a dog's inborn need to learn.
Reason to train #30
Don't expect your dog to behave in a world he doesn't understand. Train!!!!
Reason to train #7
You can teach your dog how to make decisions in life based on the rules you have laid out with the training you do.
Control the environment, not the animal. Give the animal the ability to make choices, just control which choices are available. They soon learn what gets them what they want and they abandon that which doesn't work.
In most cases, play will handle stress in a dog. Play, and then play closer and closer to what is stressing the dog. If that's other dogs, just put up a see through barrier or utilize one until the stress is alleviated.
Too many use exercise as a method of handling behavior issues in dogs - exercise, lots of exercise.
Think about exercise as a method of handling the symptoms of stress like a human alcoholic. The normal methods of relieving stress, built by centuries and eons of evolution, are denied you, so you drink to escape. You get drunk and feel as though you can at least cope. The muscles relax, a filter is placed in front of your eyes and your mind and your stress is shoved to the hindend of awareness. Eventually you are not affected by the alcohol and the hindend is shoved to the forefront. A little while later, it takes more and more alcohol to create the filter of perception and less and less time between drinks as the body and the mind develop a tolerance.
This same things happens to a dog who is being forced to exercise to handle behavior issues. As the days go by, the body gets stronger, the heart beats easier and the lungs learn to process oxygen more efficiently. The recovery time after exercise is lessoned and the issues resurface. More and more exercise is used as a means of solving this problem. But the dog only turns into an Olympic athlete capable of running all day if necessary and turning on the first dog it spies and now much more capable of chasing the neighbors cat and catching it.
Exercise is needed, don't get me wrong, but it is not the solution to behavior issues. I think, also, that most of us would agree that exercise without an immediate purpose, without a tangible goal is boring and pointless. Wolves and wild dogs don't exercise just for the sake of exercise, they play to hone skills and create the muscles, flexibility and speed necessary to hunt - to survive. Why not use what dogs and other related canids use to handle
I have must-have behaviors that are similar to but very different then most trainers teach. Except for the recall “come”, and one position, either sit or down, most are not considered "obedience". In my opinion, what a pup or newly adopted dog should learn first are: offer eye contact attention, respond to his name, entertain himself when given the “all-done” command, shift his focus from an environmental stimulus to his person when told to “leave” it, and release whatever he’s got between his teeth when told to “give” or "out". Add to that walking loosely on a leash and not mauling every other dog or human in greeting, and you have a well rounded pup.
