I have a 13 week old female pit puppy that is extremely smart. Responds to positive reinforcement almost instantly (meaning behavior = reward, vs. the withdrawal of something she wants or otherwise ignoring behavior I don’t want to extinguish it. That she’s MUCH slower about, and I’m certain it’s somehow my own failures and inconsistencies…).
She’s energetic and curious and willful and she’s going to be a great dog, if I can survive long enough to help her become one.
I’m working on a few issues, but the one that I don’t really have a solid strategy for is her strong and noisy resistance to confinement/boundaries/separation. I have been training her with a crate (primarily for nighttime) and X-pens (one in the living room, one in my office). I also sometimes leave her outside in the yard without access indoors, alongside my adult dog, Preston.
I do not recall other puppies I’ve raised persisting in their resistance to these things as long and as strong as she is. It’s not as though she’s constantly crying and resisting, she does quiet down and accept, but unless she’s eating or sleeping, it’s really not for long before she’s pissy and whiney and barky and mad. Which of course I cannot respond to because then she learns to get pissy and whiny and barky and mad to get what she wants, and sorry, not acceptable in this house.
On the other hand, we are still sorting out what kind of noise she makes when she has a bodily function need, and I fear she’s learning to use that to play me. So when I think she really has to go and I take her outside and she doesn’t go, she has to go back inside to her pen to learn that she can’t fuck with me like that. You are paid attention to and released when you shut the fuck up and learn to entertain yourself and cope with the bummer of being a baby that can’t be trusted while I have other stuff to do besides keep you amused. That’s part of being a dog. (Preston is so great with his crate that on the rare occasion I lock him in because service people are around and dont’ want to deal with him, I have been known to forget he was in there and hours later find myself wondering where he is. When I go let him out, he’s totally chilled. Never makes a sound. This is the goal for my girl.)
What I’m looking for from y’all is a more (hate this term but it has morphed into having a true meaning of its own) “proactive” strategy for drilling this into her head. Simply trying to tolerate her complaints and correctly time my attention to those moments when she IS quiet and mellow does not seem to be increasing her tolerance beyond the level she achieved at 10 weeks, not to mention the fact that her complaining kicks in so often and so quickly that she makes it very hard to find those times with enough space between…if you follow.
So… any tips for a more aggressively clear approach to getting her there? I don’t mind at all if it requires “training” sessions of some kind, we do that already, and it works well.
Help.