Five Bad Behaviors I Reward My Dogs For

Good dog training involves not rewarding unwanted behaviors, right? This is what I thought for years, and when Brisbane and I were doing UKC obedience trials it was what I focused on. Each week we'd attend a practice with half a dozen other handlers. Between exercises, most of the other dogs would sit or lay quietly, casually keeping an eye on their handler. Mine had his nose glued to the ground and at times seemed completely oblivious to my presence. I would ask Brisbane to watch me, to sit or lay down, to stay, to STOP SNIFFING ALREADY! It was a nonstop parade of cues, treats, and then Briz resuming whatever it was he had been doing. I usually ran out of treats before the end of class, and he never got any better.

Photo by Erin Koski

Ten years later, Sisci and I are taking an agility class. With time and experience on my side, I'm taking the exact opposite approach and rewarding the behaviors I don't want. I've found this works incredibly well, both in group classes and in everyday life. By the end of any given class, Sisci is focused on me, tuning out the environment, and so relaxed she chooses to lay down and rest.

Here are five completely counterintuitive things I reward my dogs for:

1. Barking and growling at people. 

Sisci is unsure about most people, and her first response to someone breaching her comfort zone is to warn them away. Agility class is held inside a fenced field within a larger park, and there are lots of people in sight for her to worry about when she's not zooming through tunnels or sailing over 8" jumps (or sailing over tunnels when she's feeling particularly creative). Instead of asking her to look away from the scary people by asking for her attention, I mark and reward her staring and woofing. A few treats later, she is much more interested in playing this game than angsting about that rogue human on the sidewalk.

2. Freaking out at other dogs. 

As above, the only reason Sisci screams and snaps at other dogs is because she they make her nervous. Instead of asking her to look at me, I mark and reward her fixating on the other dog. Whether it's a passing dog in the park or a super-snappy border collie doing victory laps after a jump sequence, the anxiety-producing situation becomes a cue for cookies and a good reason to focus on me.

3. Pulling on leash. 

Photo by Erin Koski

Believe it or not, most dogs don't even seem aware that they are pulling on leash. They know they
want to go in a particular direction, and they know you sometimes get annoyed and stop, pull back, yank, or make them change directions. What they don't know is that leash tension is the specific trigger for these behaviors in their human. I like to use a clicker to mark leash tension, and then run backwards so the dog has to zoom back to me for their treat. It's a lot of fun to see a dog have a lightbulb moment when they suddenly realize that pulling is what causes this celebration. Most people think this should result in a dog that pulls like a freight train, but instead it creates a dog that is both acutely aware of leash tension and tuned in to the person on the other end. Once the dog knows how the game works, they understand how to investigate all the wonderful smells without hitting the end of the leash.

4. Pestering the cats. 

Actually, I try to mark and reward merely noticing the cats, before the dogs get really interested. Cats are weird, creepy little freaks. They make all sorts of funky noises, they move erratically and seemingly without direction or reason, yet they are clearly recognizable as sentient beings rather than furry jellyfish. We make our dogs live with the pet equivalent of schizophrenic hobos and expect them to mind their manners even when the other guy defies all social conventions. A whole lot of dogs learn to politely tolerate a range of bizarre cat behaviors without ever feeling truly at ease about the whole situation. To help my dogs relax when cats are being cats, I routinely reward them when someone is climbing the drapes, racing from room to room, or hissing in their face At first they get a cookie just for seeing a cat, or hearing cats thunder around the house.

5. Jumping up on people. 

This isn't the same for every dog, but I actually like to see Sisci jump up on people. She's quite leery of strangers, and right now it's only reasonable to expect her to exist in their vicinity. Ignoring them is fine, actual interaction is usually too much pressure. Very occasionally, while I'm casually conversing with someone, Sisci will cautiously stand up and put her front paws on them. This is the least-threatening way she has found to interact with a scary new person, and doesn't cause them to loom over her. So far she has only done this with some of my trainer friends, who totally understand what a big step it is. Brisbane can be an impolite greeter and sometimes wants to clobber people with his feet, but I'm happy to see Sisci attempt any greeting at all. We'll work on polite greeting when it happens more often.

How Do I Get My Dog to Stop Barking at Everything?

What do you do with a dog that barks at every single noise and person passing by the house? Is there a way to end all the barking without resorting to a shock or spray collar? Is moving out to the countryside or finding a new home for the dog the only option?

Photo by Erin Koski

The Dilemma

A major downside to owning high-energy herding dogs in the middle of town is their tendency to want to alert me to every single thing happening in the neighborhood. We live in a very, very busy neighborhood. It's an extremely high-density area, especially for a place where nothing is more than two stories high. Many, many people lack their own vehicle, and tons of people walk. At any given moment there are probably a couple of cars passing by, a handful of people walking, and probably a bike or two. Skateboards are the most exciting thing, loud and fast-moving, and usually accompanied by shouting.

We do not have a backyard. Behind my house is another house, with a driveway running past us. Most of the lots in my neighborhood are the same way, including the one next door which actually has three different houses on the small property. This means I have a driveway running just outside the windows on either side of the house, with people coming and going all day and night. In back we have the neighbors, who spend a lot of time outside and really like to skateboard. In front we have our tiny yard surrounded by a short chain link fence, and on the other side of that is the street with no sidewalk between.

All this is to say that, when we first move in, Brisbane found a great many things to bark about. Kids skateboarding down the driveway! Random person walking down the street! Leafblower! Special needs people with weird gaits from the housing project across the street! So much barking. First I tried rewarding him every time we heard a sound that I knew would set him off, but this required constant vigilance on my part and often I wasn't even certain what had set him off. When frustrated I would squirt him a squirt bottle or yell at him to knock it off, but that didn't convince him that skateboards were not the sound of impending doom.

Making Things Boring

What did finally work was a solution I got from someone online that lived in an apartment with a barky dog. Their advice was to have the dog drag a leash, and every time she barked they would silently and calmly take the leash and walk the dog to the bathroom, turn on the light, and shut her in there. When she had been quiet for a minute or two, they would open the door and go back to whatever it was they had been doing. Repeat every time the dog barks until they stop barking at stuff.

This worked remarkably well for Brisbane, so much that he stopped reacting to the sound of skateboards at all. He would still like to bite them when he sees them rolling, but the sound of them no longer gives him fits. Likewise, he no longer bats an eye or ear when people walk down the street and have loud and inexplicable conversations at 2am. The first day Briz barked a normal amount and I quietly escorted him to the bathroom at least fifty times before he began to bark less. By day two he was almost completely silent, and within a week he was ignoring those skateboarders like a pro.

Why Does It Work?

The reason why the silent and neutral time out works is because the bathroom is really boring. The fan makes some white noise that blocks out everything else, there's no window, and there's nothing to do in there. A bored dog might eventually unroll the toilet paper or tip over the trash, but for a couple of minutes most dogs seem to just chill out. If I had an especially naughty or bathroom-phobic dog, I would be doing their time outs in a different location, like a back room if they always bark at things out front, or tied to a doorknob in a hallway. I'd like to avoid using the crate because I don't want to make it an unhappy place by having to shove them in there. With the bathroom I can just walk the dog through the door and then leave.

Doing nothing is a good way for a dog to chill out a little, but it's tough for them to chill when they are stressed or afraid. This is why I keep a leash on them, so I can calmly pick it up off the floor without having to reach directly for the dog when I'm already kind of pissed. Ideally, I want them to go from "look! something to bark at!" to "*sigh* booooring" without worrying that I might do something scary in between. This is important, because I am trying hard to chain their overly-excited behavior to calm chill-out time.

Attaching blah, dull time to excitement behavior can help to make that behavior and its trigger less exciting. It's sort of like a rollercoaster, hear a skateboard, leave the loading area. Start barking, go up the big hill. Calmly walk to the bathroom, go down the hill and get off the ride. As the association between barking and chilling out gets stronger, the hill gets smaller. The dog goes from "I hear stuff, I bark, I chill out" to "I hear stuff, I chill out".

But It Totally Works

It's been a while since I've had barking issues with Brisbane, but Sisci spent her first few months on a rural property with minimal surrounding traffic and lots of space between neighbors. Coming to town with me was a big change, and she is pretty sure that the neighbors are coming to kill us all. Every car door slam, note of mariachi music, or shrieking child is cause for alarm. Often I don't even know what it is she's barking about. This evening I was especially frustrated and finally thought about how to solve the problem. I remembered what I did with Brisbane, and it has worked beautifully. So far we have made a dozen trips to the bathroom and already her big barks have become little woofs. Getting up to put her in time out over and over again will be totally worth it when she can handle the daily sounds of our neighborhood stress-free.