6 Dog Training Myths, Part 2

Guilty or Afraid?

Edie Jarolim of the Will My Dog Hate Me blog and Am I Boring My Dog book asked me to address six of the more pervasive myths about dog training and dog behavior.

I had a lot of fun thinking about these myths, and we ended up with enough for two blog posts. The first 3 dog training myths are over on Will My Dog Hate Me.

Don’t introduce a puppy to other dogs and people too soon; he might get sick.

This is exactly the opposite of what you should do! Socialization during the first 3 months of life is critical for a puppy. Puppies are open to meeting new people and experiencing new environments during this period, and careful socialization pays huge dividends, while isolation can incur a tremendous cost in behavioral problems later in life.

Socialization is so critical that the American Veterinary Society of Animal has issued a position statement recommending puppy socialization become a part of every puppy’s life, stating that “Behavioral issues, not infectious diseases, are the number one cause of death for dogs under three years of age.”

You can always tell when your dog did something bad because he has a guilty look on his face when he sees you.

Alexandra Horowitz, professor, researcher, and author of the excellent Inside of a Dog, actually published some research on this last year.

She invited some people and their dogs to run an experiment. The dogs were left alone in a room and told not to eat a treat. In some cases the dogs were then given the treat after their humans left, while others were not. When the people returned they were frequently told the opposite of what happened!

Dogs most often looked guilty when their people were disciplining them, whether they had eaten the treat or not.

It turns out that what we read as a “guilty look” is in fact an appeasing and fearful look. They’re not saying “I’m sorry.” They are saying “Please don’t hurt me.”

Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Old dogs can’t learn new tricks.

When we adopted Buddha he was somewhere between 4 and 6 years old. (It was hard to tell with his badly broken teeth.) He was not house-trained. He panicked the first time we put a leash on him. He literally did not understand “sit.” A year later he had already passed Canine Good Citizen, was a Delta pet partner, and became the best of my three dogs for demonstrations in classes. Oh yeah, he stopped peeing in the foyer too.

Learning never stops for dogs. (Not sure if we can say that about all people though.) When a fifteen year old dog’s food dish is moved across the room he learns where it is using the same process that he would learn how to sit for a treat.

What may be difficult for an older dog is learning new habits over old. When we talk about how strong a behavior is, trainers often refer to the “reinforcement history.” Fifteen years of jumping up on Aunt Edna and getting a pat on the head is a long reinforcement history, and changing the behavior is not going to be as easy as changing it would have been 14 and half years ago.