7 Reasons NOT to Train Your Dog

Monday, January 18th, 2010 at 11:05 am

For a very good guide to all sorts of dog training processes and dog behavior challenges, I use and recommend Clickertraining ...that link goes to the description of this terrific ebook you download immediately, wherever you are! -- Rosana

1. Dog training would take away from your time to watch television.

2. Your dog is alpha and won’t let you.

3. If God meant for dogs to sit, they would be born with chairs on their bottoms.

4. The sound of the clicker might wake the baby.

5. Your dog might learn the secrets of training and train you.

6. Old dogs don’t don’t learn new tricks.

7. You can’t be the person that your dog thinks you are.

Okay, I hope you realized this is not serious.These may be reasons but they are not good reasons.

This list came out of a day when I was discouraged about people getting around to doing dog training. Now for a few comments…

1. Dog training does take time. But you can do it during the ads on TV. Once you get some habits going, they take surprisingly little time.

2. “Alpha” is an outmoded concept but behind #2 above is the uneasiness a lot of people do feel about being the boss over a dog who pretty much does what it pleases. I find the easiest way to deal with this issue is to reframe how you think about dog training. Think of it as dog games and you and the dog and playmates.

3. Behind this one is the attitude that always astonishes me: that it isn’t natural to train dogs. Well, excuse me, but it isn’t natural to let them be hit by cars either. We humans haven’t lived in a purely natural world for quite a few centuries now and neither have our dogs. I won’t even get into how natural it is that humans have created so many different dog breeds!

4. If you have a baby or children, and you have one or more dogs, dog training just become an extremely urgent priority.

5. Guess what, your dog has already trained you.

6. Balderdash.

7. None of us can be the people our dogs think we are but this is one of the great gifts of living with dogs. They keep loving us no matter what.

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deb35

I desparately need some help and obviously can't locate it. I have spent HOURS researching and can't find anything to answer our problem. We have 3 rescue dogs (7,5 and 3 years old). They we "fairly" house trained when Hurricane Kartina displaced us. The 2 older dogs were in a boarding kennel for 6 months. Since then we acquired another dog and can't get the 2 older dogs back into the "go outside to potty" mode of thinking. The door is ALWAYS open and they stay outside for hours only to use the living room in the middle of the night as their personal toilet. We have tried everything suggested and have had no luck. It is to the point we are ready to find new homes for them:(. Any suggestions?

Rosana

First, stop letting them be free in the night. Crate them. See my page on crate training here:
http://training-dogs.com/crate-training.html

And see a long post with an even longer discussion about housetraining problems with adult dogs:
http://www.training-dogs.com/blog/housetraining...

deb35

Thank you for the quick response- We will try this- I hope it won't be too bad considering they have slept in the bed with us since they were puppies. It may take a while for them to get used to this idea, not to mention us getting used to it as well!
Thanks for the help and all you do for the animals!

Deb

Rosana

Well, keep sleeping with them but don't let them out of the bedroom. Chances are high (but admittedly not 100%) that they won't use the bedroom for a potty, as dogs don't mess up their "dens" typically!