This week I’m here to help you with an issue that drives well-intentioned dog people crazy: when the dog KNOWS better but doesn’t DO better.
Training Your Dog to Listen
At the worst moment, your dog has decided to potty inside, or chew up your favorite shoes, or bark at your neighbors, or ignore you when you call him to come… even though you’re pretty sure they know this is VERY unwanted behavior.
This can be insanely frustrating. It can often feel like you’ve got the most stubborn dog in the world. And now a sense of hopelessness is settling in…
But it’s not that simple and things aren’t hopeless.
Changing Your Dog’s Behavior
“Knowing” better is only the FIRST step in behavioral change. And it’s not the most difficult step.
How many times do we, as larger-brained humans, KNOW better but not ACT better. We know we should spend less time checking our phones, eating sugar, procrastinating, deferring maintenance, and complaining about things we can’t control.
But we don’t always do it. Even the most disciplined among us rarely stick to ONLY what we KNOW is best.
Why?
Because it’s easier and more enjoyable in the short-term not to.
And because we’ve spent a lot of time practicing our bad habits.
If “knowing” were all that’s required, we’d all have fewer problems and larger bank accounts and less anxiety and stress and MAN life would go more smoothly. And we’d also have dogs that were much easier to manage.
But we understand that things are more complicated.
We not only have to know. We also have to practice and set up the environment to make success probable.
The same goes for our dogs.
The IMMEDIATE consequences of the dog’s behavior need to match our desired outcome. Getting frustrated with the dog after the fact doesn’t help, just like yelling at ourselves after a bad day rarely leads to lasting behavioral change.
And this process of correctly aligned consequences needs to be repeated over and over. No matter how skilled a dog person you are, you need a lot of repetition to convert “knowing” into consistent action. It’s how dogs learn. They are creatures of habit and they cling tightly to bad habits. Annoying but reversible. One of the reasons board & trains work so well is that we trainers obsess about repetitions and consistency.
How Dogs Learn
Knowing things is great, but what we want is REPEATED behaviors. Habits. New mindsets, even. There’s no way around this. Effective training is a shortcut, but it’s not an escape from this basic reality of behavior change.
We are what we repeatedly do. I stole that line from historian Will Durant, who was paraphrasing Aristotle, a very smart guy who still had to deal with these issues. So you are certainly NOT alone.
What one knows is less important than the repeated habits we allow and encourage.Â
If your dog knows better but doesn’t do better, figure out where the system is breaking down. And then build those new habits.
You’re off to a great start. I’m excited to see where you’ll end up.