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Originally Posted by tASSy
i would hate to get a dog from a rescue organisation that had you as a staff member/volunteer.
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I'd hate to have someone too afraid to discipline their animal adopt a dog from me. Those are the people who usually return the dog (or who surrender it in the first place) because they can't control it.
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if you worked so long with dogs (as i have)
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Oh? And how long has that been? And what kind of dogs were they?
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you would know that their memories are not long enough to remember what you're punishing them for.
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Thats why you never discipline a dog after it has forgotten what it did.
I never said "Go out there and shove his nose in the hole 5 weeks after he dug it". If he's not actively performing the bad behavior (or JUST stopped it), you'd be wasting your time.
I doubt you've ever had a truly hard case dog to deal with.
I had a dog who literally did everything bad you can imagine. She was terrible. She dug. She chewed up a couch. No, I don't mean nibbled it. I mean one day I went to class and by the time I came back and the entire couch was decimated. She chewed holes through doors. She had such massive separation anxiety anytime I left the house something new was destroyed. Shoes, even a weight bench.
By the time I was done with her, she was the model of good behavior. I could walk her down the sidewalk in Bensonhurst on a busy Saturday morning and she'd walk right next to me without any need for a leash.
I had to put her to sleep for medical reasons when she was 6. The night before I put her down, I tried to feed her steak for dinner. I put the steak, fresh off the grill, right in front of her. She didn't touch it.
Negative reinforcement is important to training. No, you shouldn't be heavy handed with discipline, and any discipline should match the infraction. Both positive and negative should also be consistent.
The dog should be convinced first by the joy that your praise gives him. When he does bad, he should be saddened by the fact that he has disappointed you. And when he cannot or will not be made to understand that you expect more, you need to be willing to punish him. If that means putting him on sit-stay for 20 minutes or something more, so be it. Anyone unwilling to put the time into training a dog should not have one - because those are the people who finally end up surrendering their animal (or worse yet, euthanizing them) because they can't muster up the intestinal fortitude to train an animal.