My dog jumps on guests when they walk through the door!!!
My dog barks incessantly at people when they walk past our house!!!
My dog sneaks away and pees on the floor!!!
In my line of work these are the frustrated statements that I hear on a daily basis.
The problem is, though, that nearly everyone is looking at their dog problems through the wrong lenses and the wrong perspective.
Albert Einstein was once quoted as saying that if he had one hour to save the world he would spend 55 minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution.
I think that idea is brilliant. (For that matter Einstein had lots of brilliant stuff to say…you ever catch that Theory Of Relativity stuff?)
I’ll bet you never thought that Einstein could help you with your dog training but let’s analyze what he said. Let’s replace the ‘saving the world’ idea with a ‘solving the behavior problem’ idea.
If you had to solve the issue of the dog jumping on the guest how would you look at it? Most dog owners tend to look at it and with frustrated internal and external exclamations say, “Uggh! I wish my dog would stop jumping on everyone!”
I contend that the owner should instead analyze the problem and instead of lamenting the bad behavior should instead be saying, “Okay, I don’t like this jumping behavior. What ELSE would I RATHER see my dog doing?”
Fill in the blanks with the other previously mentioned issues. Instead of ‘I wish my dog would stop barking at people through the window who pass the house’ you should be saying ‘What would I rather Ranger does when he sees someone through the window?’
When you look at dog training problems from a solution based mindset vs. a frustration based mindset it allows you to diagnose and choreograph a solution much faster and easier.
In the example of a dog jumping on people coming through the door my preference would be that the dog would lie down and stay 15 feet back when someone rings the bell. Once I’ve made that my blueprint now I can start figuring out what is the most effective way to get my dog to do that instead of getting bummed about what he’s currently doing.
This mindset is critical if you are going to have training success. Quite often people will look over my dog training DVDs and they’ll email us to ask questions like, “Well, my problems are very specific. Do you have any videos about dogs who chase cars?” Or they’ll ask, “My dog is only aggressive to men. Do you have any specific videos for that?”
We respond back that the answer is, no, we don’t have such specifics in our dvds but it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you achieve obedience with your dog and then use it in WHATEVER scenario where you’d ‘like your dog to do something else’.
Thinking about dog training the ‘Einstein way’ requires that you have a great level of obedience and then use that obedience to start analyzing your problems from the viewpoint of ‘what else would I like my dog to do?’
