Do We Rush the Training Process?
Do We Rush the Training Process?
We bring our new furry buddy home and can’t wait to teach her fun things, take her on road trips and just hang out watching Netflix together. If you have adopted an adult dog, you might even get out a toy or treat and ask her to do a sit or lay down. She does those quickly, so you tell her she is a good girl, give her the prize and head out for a walk. She has obviously had some training, right? On the walk she shows a string of behavior issues you didn’t expect, because she knew sit and down, you did not expect her to drag you off your feet as she tries to chase the cat walking by and fights through the fence with the dog down the street – well, this isn’t fun!
Maybe it’s a sweet little puppy you brought home. You know he will whimper through the night a couple nights, but he will bond to you and then not miss his mom and litter mates. You do the late night, early morning potty breaks and after two weeks, he is still using the house as his toilet and instead of whimpering he now screams. Where did it go wrong?
Regardless of the age that your new buddy arrived in your life, after a couple months, things start getting frustrating. You know you taught her not to chew the couch, or that he has been shown the potty area outside, but these issues keep coming up.
After taking a few training classes with my own dogs and taught classes, I started wondering if we might just be pushing our dogs too fast. A common training class takes the dog from how to sit on cue to passing the Canine Good Citizen test in only two months. The average student works with their dog 1-2 times a week for about 20 minutes each time between classes. If you really think about all we teach our dogs and everything they need to know to be successful living with humans, is two months enough? Everything we expect them to learn and know is the equivalent of preschool to high school. Are we expecting too much too fast?
If we slow things down, we give our canine companions the opportunity to really learn what we expect when it come to human house rules. Let’s face it, dog’s rules are completely different than ours and they don’t even know our language. To really help our dogs know how to live with humans, let’s start by giving them time to really know where their toilet area is, when to expect meal times, what they can and can’t chew. That alone can take four weeks or more, but it’s only four weeks in the lifetime of adventures we have with our canine companions.
So, instead of rushing through, let’s slow things down, really help your dog learn. If you have a trainer and he/she is rushing you to get through a training series at a certain pace, find a new one. Everyone learns at their own pace and in their own way. Don’t let someone rush you and your dog through the early stages of your lives together. Enjoy every day. Accept that you will get frustrated. Know that in the end, it is worth every moment.
