Q&A-Untrainable dogs, old dogs, do ecollars create aggression, and more
I get lots of great questions from our clients and listeners. Here are a few that I get asked a lot.
Have you ever had a dog you couldn’t train? Answer: not a normal dog. We have had a few that didn’t have much hope, but it’s extremely rare. Maybe 1 out of 500 has a very poor prognosis of being able to get to a point where they are “safe enough” to stay in their home. I describe what was different about these dogs and the difficult part—telling the owners that they have one of those dogs.
How old is too old to train? All dogs learn..even old ones. But it is a little different. We find the biggest factor isn’t so much age, but age combined with what they have learned so far. Learning itself is a skill to be built. A 5 year old dog that has never even had to learn their name is not going to do as well as a 7 year old dog that has learned lots of commands and maybe done puppy training, and learned tricks, etc.
Do tools cause aggression? Short answer: no. But yes. While aggression isn’t created by ecollars or prong collars it can look like it is as these tools can really piss your dog off when they are in the throws of reactivity. I’m talking about some specific examples I’ve seen in this episode. Any tool can frustrate a dog and aggression that is exhibited in those cases is usually aggression revealed not created.
All this and more in today’s episode!
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Minute-by-Minute Breakdown
- 00:00-00:59 – Welcome to Off Leash and Unfiltered Trigger Warning.
- 01:00-01:59 – here in this state, hopefully you’re getting to enjoy this amazing weather.
- 02:00-02:59 – we’re almost, uh, fully functioning again as a unit, uh, thank goodness and some exciting stuff happening right now.
- 03:00-03:59 – Everything Under the Sun that you can imagine.
- 04:00-04:59 – <laugh>.
- 05:00-05:59 – negative impact on your dog or your dog’s behavior.
- 06:00-06:59 – And she was telling me basically that her standards were very low.
- 07:00-07:59 – and this has nothing to do with them being small.
- 08:00-08:59 – of two or three dogs, uh, during the entire course of my career dog training, which now has been what, at least eight years.
- 09:00-09:59 – situation, that’s a dog that can’t come home with me.
- 10:00-10:59 – leash and p prong on the dog.
- 11:00-11:59 – on the dog.
- 12:00-12:59 – and, um, sniff us or otherwise engage with us until we say it’s okay.
- 13:00-13:59 – I totally ignored it.
- 14:00-14:59 – And that dog did not, um, he did not make progress with us.
- 15:00-15:59 – other people, and I believe that the dog cannot be trained to a level of reliability where they can be at least safely managed, right?
- 16:00-16:59 – euthanasia.
- 17:00-17:59 – not gonna be able to fix this problem and this someone’s going to get hurt.
- 18:00-18:59 – but the fact is it’s less than 1% <laugh>.
- 19:00-19:59 – Um, she’s here for training right now for board and train.
- 20:00-20:59 – The more your dog learns, the better they get it learning.
- 21:00-21:59 – Do they prefer getting their own way?
- 22:00-22:59 – made a dog aggressive, the answer to that is just black and white.
- 23:00-23:59 – toward being pushy and entitled and demanding and sort of independent and dominant and, and just in nature, right?
- 24:00-24:59 – we started training, we obviously we have our tools on the dog.
- 25:00-25:59 – here involved.
- 26:00-26:59 – And then when you decide one day you are, the dog fights back and says, now you are a doormat.
- 27:00-27:59 – prevents them from moving toward the target.
- 28:00-28:59 – on the dog, tools aren’t a conversation.
- 29:00-29:59 – And so no tools do not create aggression.
- 30:00-30:59 – So, um, no, the tools do not make your dog aggressive.
- 31:00-31:59 – behaviorists, like all sorts of folks claiming that, um, basically a dog is just a result of their training and environment.
- 32:00-32:59 – if there’s a high percentage of people saying it.
- 33:00-33:59 – a genetic component to every behavior, okay?
- 34:00-34:59 – and we won’t know for a while, right?
- 35:00-35:59 – So that’s a a really good example.
- 36:00-36:59 – how much dopamine, like all these things, right?
- 37:00-37:59 – we’re dealing with and what we normally see come out of that.
- 38:00-38:59 – will accumulate.
- 39:00-39:59 – to be extremely aggressive, not toward people, toward dogs.
- 40:00-40:59 – crutch won’t help you either saying, well, there’s no point in training the dog because they can’t learn it.
- 41:00-41:59 – we might be able to make a lot of progress and she does good most of the time, but then a different situation pops up where it just…
- 42:00-42:59 – the determining factor.