Good one taken from one of the dog training secret web sites.
Do you ever ask your dog to do something, and he just doesn’t seem to listen?
Have you ever asked a friend to watch your new puppy shake, or lie down or sit on command, only to have your puppy completely ignore your commands when you try to give him the cue?
This type of seemingly stubborn behaviour really isn’t stubbornness at all. Let me explain by telling you a short story…
When I was trying to train my dog Bauer the “down”
command he seemed to catch on very quickly. I would just sit in my living room, and every time my dog laid down I’d just watch closely and give him the cue for “down” right before he’d go to lay down and in no time at all he was laying down on cue.
Most people make the mistake of thinking this is all it takes to teach the down command. In reality, even though I could sit in my living room, give my dog the “down” command, and 99 times out of 100 he’d lay down and wait for his reward, that didn’t mean that he really knew how to obey the “down” command.
What I mean is that even though the dog knew how to do the behaviour. My dog didn’t fully comprehend the cue for when to do the behaviour.
I realized this when my in laws first came over to my house to see our new puppy after we first brought him home.
I was so excited, because I thought I’d taught him the down command at 10 weeks old… after all he would lay down every time I trained him in our living room.
But what I didn’t realize, was that even though I was sitting in my living room and saying “down” as the cue for my dog to lay down… my dog wasn’t paying any attention to the words I was saying.
Instead, he was actually watching my head movement.
Because in addition to saying down as my cue, I was also looking at my dog and giving him a quick little nod of my head each time I gave the verbal cue.
And little did I realize that my dog wasn’t listening to a word I said, he was just waiting for me to give the little head movement.
So when I went to show my in laws how quickly I’d trained my new puppy to lay down, I just gave the down command without my little head nod, and the dog wouldn’t obey me.
Some people would naively think that the dog is being stubborn. These types of peoples say things like “I know he knows how to do this, he’s just being stubborn”…. WRONG!
He’s not being stubborn at all. You just don’t realize that your dog is capable of noticing EXTREMELY small cues, and you’re giving them off without even knowing it.
This is actually a HUGE problem in training animals.
The first people to really discover that animals could pick up extremely tiny cues, were the people who first trained chimpanzees sign language. These people swore that they had taught chips to communicate via sign language in a way where the chimps could convey wants, needs and desires.
But when scientists were brought in to first analyze this they discovered something AMAZING. The chimps were not using sign language as a way to communicate.
But in fact the chimp trainers had accidentally trained the chimps to sign using accidental cues with their EYES!
That’s right, the chimps would see their trainers eyes move up, down, left or right and depending on the patterns of the eye movements of their trainers, would sign the coordinating signs.
That’s how capable animals are of understanding TINY cues.
And it’s a mistake that even veteran animal trainers make. So if you catch yourself thinking that your dog is being stubborn and not wanting to obey you, what’s probably happened is you’ve accidentally trained your dog in a way where he doesn’t really understand what the cue to the behaviour is.
How I ended up fixing this with my puppy, is I made sure that I gave the verbal cue of “down” from dozens of positions. I’d give it sitting, standing up, with my back to my dog, from a distance, with my eyes closed etc. etc.
Because as soon as I stopped offering my little nod as a cue for my dog to lie down, my dog started to think that the cue only worked if I was sitting in a chair, cuz that’s where I’d been doing the training.
And if I was lying on the floor of my living room and gave the cue for “down” it was like my dog never even heard the cue.
Again, this isn’t that my dog was stubborn, but that I was giving off cues that I still don’t even realize I was giving off. And only by really forcing myself to train the down command while I was personally in a LARGE variety of situations was I able to get the dog to really understand that he needs to listen to the verbal command and not watch my body language for the cue.
When you think about it, it makes sense. Why would a dog who’s trying to figure out what we’re trying to teach it first think to look for clues in the English language? That would be absurd.
Of course it makes sense that instead of listening to words, the dog would look for physical cues like posture head movements etc.
So next time you catch yourself thinking your dog is acting stubborn, rethink through your training process, and maybe, just maybe, you haven’t REALLY taught him to understand the cue like you thought you did.
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