How Dogs Learn

It's important to understand how dogs learn to be able to teach them what you want, whether it's an obedience command like sit or down, or teaching them to behave properly. You want them to have good manners.

First and foremost, dogs learn by repetition. It really doesn't matter where the first behavior came from, what matters most is that if you don't want it to continue, you must find a way to disallow it from being done again. That might entail using your crate a bit differently ( refer to article on crate training).

If your dog is crated when not supervised, even when you are home, they will grow up repeating only the behaviors you have taken the time to form for them.

The same principle applies when teaching command response. If you want your dog to sit every time you ask them to, say the word (one time only), place them in that position and praise them.

Remember, the key here is consistency. Repeat successful responses only.

Dogs make associations based only on what is happening at that exact point in time. Let's use for an example, chewing. You come in the room and Tiny is chewing on the leg of the chair. You think, "perfect timing, I caught him in the act, so he'll understand when I spank* him". Actually, the dog hears, "It's okay to sniff the chair, it's okay to lick the chair, it's even okay to chew on it, but now it's time to stop." On the other hand, if your timing is right, your dog will learn to stay away from the things that don't belong to him.

Understand that all correction does is (hopefully) control the behavior for a moment or two, or even a day or two. In order to change behavior, you must change the dog's thought process; change his mind before he acts on the thought. "Don't even think about it!" When you see him moving towards, or exhibiting interest in, that object you want him to avoid, use either a sharp noise, but NOT the overused word NO, or throw something in his direction, to startle (not scare) him. Once the dog startles he will be most receptive to a redirection of his thought pattern, so encourage him back to you. Now you can give him something constructive to do, like play with a toy of his own.

If you catch the dog red handed and are too late to redirect, try to get the dog to the point where under the same circumstance, but in your presence, he exhibits the same behavior (set him up); for instance, chewing your shoe. Get the shoe from him without the chase, and put it on the floor and as soon as he looks at it, interupt his thought. You want the dog's last experience to be successful behavior/choices as determined by your direction.

*A note about spanking:
It is never okay to hit/spank your dog. There is nothing positive that can come from it. Your dog might become defensively aggressive (try to protect themselves from you), or submissive and afraid of you. They're supposed to respect and look to you in trust, for direction. Don't betray that.