Heart Like a Dog

The Good, the Bad, and the Oh My God of living with dogs!

Negative Punishment

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I’ve become determined to work with Delilah on her down stays.

It’s not an easy  task.

Since she likes to be in the bathroom with me I figure it’s win-win.  She gets to be in the bathroom with me and I get to work on her downs.  The trouble with this is, she doesn’t always stay in the down.

I thought well maybe the floor (being ceramic and all) is too cold and she’s uncomfortable, so I took the bathroom rug and threw it down.  She still got up.

Listen to your readers.

A couple of posts ago Jan said, “Some of the best advice I ever got was not to try to treat my kids or my dogs the same way. They are all different entities, with different needs and all of them have let me know what kind of attention they want from me.

It was hard to do but I finally learned not to reward bad behavior by giving that kid or dog more attention. Praise the good one and the other will want to copy that behavior.”

This comment really got me thinking.  When I’m in the bathroom and I put Delilah into a down stay and she gets up.  What do I do?  I go back and put her in a down stay again.

I asked myself, “What does this teach her?”

I answered, “It teaches her that when she doesn’t do as I ask, I reward her with more attention.”

Jodi Stone, you are a bad dog trainer!

Look, I don’t want to scare you or force you to burn your retinas out with bleach so try not to visualize this too much.  Today I got out of the shower, dried myself off and applied my lotion.

While I was waiting for my lotion to dry, I decided to blow dry my hair.  Since I have short, fine hair I throw a little product in there, bend over and blow it upside down.

As I’m bent over in this upside down position with my hair dryer in my hands, who comes shoving her way through my legs.

Yup.

First I laughed, because I’m dumb and can’t help myself but then I took the rug and put it on the floor and said, “Down.”

She sat on the rug.

I didn’t battle with her at all, I took her by the collar, led her out into the bedroom and shut her out of the bathroom.

Seeing as this is DELILAH we are writing about, I need to make sure there is nothing lying about that she will decide to chew up or I will need to make sure the bedroom door is shut before I banish her.

Negative Punishment.

“Negative punishment reduces behaviors by taking away or withholding something good or something the dog will work for.”

I’ve been using this technique for a couple of weeks in a number of different ways.

When she does not sit while I am preparing her meals, I stop what I am doing and wait.  My motto is “Nothing moves in the kitchen if you’re moving.”

When we are eating dinner and she is supposed to be in a down on her place and she gets up, she goes in her crate.

Last night we were watching TV and eating our dinner, it was a pretty intense show and we were both fixated on the TV.  I caught movement and realized she’d gotten up and gone over to inspect her bowl.

FAIL.

In the crate she went.

Get excited about this.

Let your mind soar as you think of the possibilities.

Dog doesn’t respond to recall = Dog stays on leash.

Child doesn’t clean room = Child doesn’t go to birthday party.

Husband doesn’t mow lawn = Wife doesn’t,,,,,,,,,,,

buy beer.

Where did you think I was going with that?

Book Update:  I haven’t updated you about my book in a while.  Truthfully, I wrote a really exciting part of the book and then I didn’t know what to do next, so I put it down for a while.  But I’ve picked it back up and my book now has 25,051 words.

Off-Roading

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Lately when I go to walk the dogs on Monday or Wednesday, I head over to the second entrance to avoid the commotion of the LaCrosse team arriving at our regular entrance.  Last night I was bit later than normal and thought maybe most of the people had already arrived.  I was wrong.

I turned around and headed over to the other entrance.  This takes about 5 minutes since we need to go down one hill and up another.  As I pulled up to the second entrance I realized there was already a car there and the person inside had a dog.

The woman was fussing about in her car doing what I don’t know, but her music was blaring and I could see a small Cocker Spaniel type dog sitting on her lap. I waited a minute or so and got frustrated with her just sitting there, so I said too bad; we’re going to back to our entrance and we’ll deal with LaCrosse!

I basically wasted about 15 minutes trying to figure out the best way to get to our trails.

There was one young boy getting dropped off as we entered the park, I could see him focused on the dogs and walking cautiously.  I kept both Sampson and Delilah on leash and guided them off the main path.  As we got to the top of the hill I saw their friend Brady and his mom entering from their side.  I said, “Go get Brady.”  And Sampson took off.  Delilah of course was forced to wait and go at my pace.

We started down one of our paths and ran into my next door neighbor of all things, with her two small boys and her dog Gunner.  I still can’t figure out what kind of dog Gunner is.  His face reminds me of an Akita, but he is not large and he is all black.  I call him… Sirius Black.

They were all sitting on the top of a large rock and while we live next door to each other, the dogs have never met.  My neighbor says that Gunner is friendly and the only time she’s ever seen him act aggressively is protecting the children.  While I thought the woods were a fairly neutral place to introduce the dogs, I preferred to do it while Hubby was around.

My friend said, “What do all these people see in these woods?”

I laughed and responded with ,“Probably the same thing we do.”

So my walking friend said, “We’ll have to go to my place.”

Turns out she just had a survey completed and she owns a LOT of land behind her house, which is wooded, has a creek and lots of boulders!  So we went off-road. 😉

Naturally we discussed all the things she could do with that extra land she has, most of which included places for the dogs to run without running into a lot of other people.

We ended up with a longer than planned walk, but the excitement and change of scenery helped tire the dogs out.

To Boldly Go Where No Dog Has Gone Before

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Yesterday I shared a little bit about an early morning walk I took with the dogs on Friday.

I had sent my friend a text asking if she and Brady were around for a walk, but hadn’t had a response back.  I figured we would just head her way and see if we ran into them.

On our way, we ran into one of her neighbors, Mark and his dog Bruno.  Since he was heading the same way we were, we walked together, chatting a little as we went.

The best way to describe our walking trails is like this:

My road ends in a cul-de-sac, if you went straight you would head up a hiking path to the field, just before the field the path heads up the hill to the right and if you went straight out that path you would enter another cul-de-sac.  My friend’s house is the second house on the right hand side.  The first house belongs to M & M who have Tia, the German Shepherd.

Just as we got to the top of the trail, near my friend’s house Bruno and Delilah started to play.  I made the mistake of dropping the leash.

As soon as I dropped the leash she stuck her nose to the ground and she headed out of the woods and into my friend’s neighborhood.  I snagged Sampson and said, “Go, Go, Go, Go, Go, Go” and started running back the way we came.

Delilah kept going.

I quickly realized she wasn’t responding, so Sampson and I turned around and headed out to get her.

Meanwhile Mark and Bruno were walking home and I could see Mark trying to get Delilah’s attention, but she ignored him.  She had wandered into M & M’s yard and their garage door was open.

Yup, Friday morning at 7:00 o’clock, Delilah walked right into M & M’s garage.

I was horrified.

Mark meanwhile had started walking down the driveway and was almost to the garage.  I got to the end of the driveway and started down myself, Delilah decided she was done in the garage and stepped off to the side thinking she could head over to Brady’s house, Sampson  meanwhile saw the open garage and decided to investigate like Delilah had.

Luckily for me as Delilah dodged out of the garage, Mark stepped on her leash and handed her back to me.  Sampson returned when called and we headed back into the woods to finish our walk.

Whew!

I will not be dropping her leash again anytime soon.  I swear to God, if she falls down a friggin rabbit hole, I’ll hold onto that leash and follow her down.

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