Why Does My Dog...?

Does your dog perform an annoying behavior like barking at you while your family tries to eat dinner? Does he pull on the leash? Does he jump up on your guests? Learn to think like a trainer!

To get the thought process started, use this fill in the blank statement:

My dog won't stop ____________ing (behavior) because sometimes he gets ___________(thing or activity he needs or wants)

It may be obvious or you may have to really think hard about what he might have gotten in the past that makes this behavior persist.

Here is a partial list in no particular order of the things dogs commonly want, need or instinctivly do:

To eat, to drink, to get a treat, to be with its human, to get attention, (even if it's negative attention some think its better than no attention), to play, to exercise, to chase, to be chased, to investigate new places, to chew, to see others (dogs, people, and animals), to mate, to feel safe, protect its territory, to mark its territory, to protect its toys, to protect its food, to protect its human, to protect itself, to stay warm, to stay cool, to have fun, to get some rest, to belong to a pack, to dominate, to submit, to hunt, to track, to herd, to hide augment, or cover its own scent.

Try filling the second blank in with any of the above items and see if it makes sense to you.

Not on the list: To seek revenge or to spite, be bored, be alone.

Suppose your dog barks at you while you eat. In this case the dog probably has gotten treats and attention in the past as a result of barking. You have to make sure this stops so the barking no longer works for the dog, but it takes patience...

Animal behaviorist B.F. Skinner found that if a chicken randomly discovers that if it pecks at a target and immediately a piece of food would fall into its enclosure, the chicken would repeat the behavior quite frequently. After the chicken is accustomed to pecking the target and receiving food, he rigged the machine to not give food anymore. What is interesting is there would be a flurry of increased target pecking even though no food would come. Only after complete frustration was reached would the chicken finally stop pecking the target. The behavior was then called extinct. The "flurry" was called an extinction burst.

I wonder how often we don't have the patience to outlast the extinction burst. I can say that making the food come out to the chicken randomly during the extinction burst strengthens the behavior of target pecking and makes future extinction bursts last longer.

So if you sometimes give in and give the dog attention when he barks you will strengthen the behavior.

The good news is the same strategy can be turned to our advantage when we are training our dogs to do something we want them to do. It has to do with how often you give the reward. Those who think you always have to give your dog a treat every time he does what you ask are simply wrong. The only time you need to do that is during the original teaching of the behavior. After that, one treat in five to ten acts of the behavior works better. It strengthens the behavior and makes it more extinction proof.