Why does my dog tump over the trash?

Factual Questions
1

My dog, whom I love very much, just cannot resist tipping over the trash can in the kitchen every time we leave (and forget to put it away). She’s generally very well-behaved and pretty smart - she’ll sit two inches from a juicy steak and not touch it until I say so. But if I leave for as little as 15 minutes, I can return to a flipped-over can and trash strewn all over the floor.

She is obviously very aware that she’s in trouble for doing this; any time we come home to a flipped-over trash, she’s already hiding under the couch in fear. We’ve tried yelling and ignoring her, alternately, but to no avail. She’s forbidden from even setting foot in the kitchen at all times.

Now, I know the obvious answer: she’s a dog, there’s food scraps in there, she wants em. But I don’t understand why she so compulsively tips over the trash as though all her discipline just flies out the window as soon as we’re gone. Does a dog need its master in the room to keep its sense of obedience and discipline? Any pet psychologists out there?

2

Dogs have a very poor grasp of cause and effect. She has no idea that you’re upset about the trash-- that happened a long time ago and is now just a dim memory to her. To her, you’re coming through the door and yelling at her for no apparent reason.

She’s not hiding because she’s feeling* guilty.* Dogs aren’t capable of guilt. She’s hiding because you’ve come home and gotten mad several times now. She’s hoping that by being very submissive, she’ll avoid your anger.

Here’s one way to train her: On your next day off, leave the house just like you were going to work or out with friends. Go around to the back of your house, (or wherever it is that you can see inside the kitchen window.) Wait. As soon as the dog starts trying to tip the can, bang on the windows loudly and scare the holy hell out of her. (Make sure she doesn’t see you.) Lather, rinse, repeat. You want her to get the idea that whenever she goes to knock over that can, something scary happens.

Whenever you have to really leave the house, put the can up on a table, or brace it with heavy objects so it can’t be tipped. Or, if you’ve got a little extra cash around, you could buy one of those motion-sensing alarms. (They sell them to put on hotel doorknobs to sense if someone’s trying to enter the room.) As soon as she nudged the can, it would start to blare and probably scare the wits out of her.

If she’s a dog with a large nose, you could try small mousetraps. My grandmother did this with her Airedale. Whenever he would start sniffing around in the top of the trashcan, the trap would go off and startle him. (His nose was too big to get pinched.) After a while, she didn’t even have to set them: just seeing a mousetrap was enough to keep him away from the trashcan.

Dogs only understand immediate consequences. As it stands now, she’s getting an instant reward for her disobedience. Instead, you want there to be an instant negative consequence.

3

Sorry to express some doubt, but my dog acts distinctly different when she’s done something, vs. when she hasn’t. This is before yelling enters the picture. 90% of the time, I remember to put the trash away and she’s perfectly happy (or, more often, sleepy) when I walk in the door. The other 10% of the time, she’s cowering and looking at me sideways, and I know before even checking the kitchen that she’s done something wrong.

Another example: one time I woke up in the morning and my dog was sitting near my bed, looking a little odd. I asked her to get up in the bed, and after several commands she finally did, only to start shivering heavily. I thought she was sick, then suddenly realized she was terrified of getting in trouble. Sure enough, she had peed on the floor at some point during the night, and she felt the trouble coming!

So, it seems like she does indeed have some sense of guilt. Maybe that’s just me.

4

Is “tump” an American version of some other verb, or just a typo?

5

“Tump over” is American slang (at least in my part of America) for “tip over.”

6

Thanks. I’ve never heard it before.

7

I have to disagree. When my dog does something bad, she holds her head down, tail between her legs and looks at me like her world is ending.

8

Well, ask yourself how many times the dog has “acted funny” and you discovered there was nothing wrong? You may not even really remember such instances because they don’t stick out in your mind, but you would remember the times when “acting funny” had a reason.

Dogs are amazingly attuned to body language. They can detect even a slight tension in their humans and might misinterpret it as anger, causing them to cower (and let’s face it, a cower always looks “guilty.”)

Let’s take the example of you waking up in the morning and seeing the dog “acting funny.” It could have been caused from you making an angry-sounding noise in your sleep right before you woke up, or having residual tension from your dream. As soon as you see the dog “acting funny”, you start to get tense and suspicious, making the dog act even* more* “funny.”

The same thing is true for when you come home. You might have some residual tension left from the day, so when you come through the door, you don’t look as relaxed to the dog as you think you do. She senses the tension and says, “Uh-oh! The furless male is angry! Better go into appeasement mode.”

Dogs simply don’t have the brain power to connect an incident earlier in the day with an incident happening now. If she got sick from eating from the trash, she wouldn’t think, “Man, I need to stop eating that stuff!” No-- she would have no idea where her belly-ache came from. They are creatures of the present. They have some memory capability, of course, or else we wouldn’t be able to train them, but it usually takes repetition of the behavior in order for the dog to make a connection between behavior and reward/punishment.

Nor do dogs have a moral sense. They don’t have a sense of what sociologists call the “generalized other”, meaning the ability to see one’s self through the eyes of others and interpret your actions through their point of view. This is actually a somewhat advanced concept. Human children don’t acquire it until around the age of three or so. Dogs are incapable of acquiring it since it requires a higher reasoning capacity.

In essence, dogs are creatures of conditioned responses. They are intelligent enough to sometimes make intuitive leaps based on what they know, but it doesn’t extend to conciousness of guilt.

9

Anything is possible I guess. I may be mistaking it for something else, but damned if it doesn’t look like guilt. But I know that she knows when she’s been bad. :slight_smile:

10

What Lissa said. Her views on dog psycology and training are the same ones held by every veterinarian I’ve ever interacted with. Maybe VetBridge will be along in a bit to add her $0.02.

Odds are, your dog is getting into the trash because she’s bored. In addition to removing the can as a source of play, give her other puzzels that are okay to play with. A Kong with a peanut butter inside, or one of these. And be sure that she gets good and exhausted when you take her out for her daily walk. Teacher her to play fetch. Train her on basic commands like sit and stay. The fun of figuring out what she has to do to make you give her a cookie crumb is endlessly entertaining.

Here are some ideas to remove the trash can from her interest: Depending on the size of the dog, either get a can that is big enough (and lidded) that she can’t tip it over, or small enough that you can keep it in a cabinet with a child-proof lock on the door.

The mousetrap idea worked well for a stubborn cat of mine who would not stay off the kitchen counter. You could also rub down or wrap the can and the immediate floor area with citrus oil. Most dogs don’t like the smell. How well these work depend on how determined your dog is.

11

And to add my opinion, I say it’s seperation anxiety.

12

I have my doubts too. My current dogs are really well behaved when we’re gone (and therefor have not exhibited guilty behavior), and our old dogs were too, most of the time. And most of the time, when we came home, they were ecstatic to see us. Absolutely beside themselves with joy at our arrival. Unless something bad had been done. Then they did not greet us at the door, but stood in the corner trying to look invisible. This was not after we come in and they “sensed our tension,” this was open the door and there they are in the corner, trying to be invisible. This never happened, never, unless there was a problem, which was pretty rare. I’m not sure why people are so convinced that dogs have no sense of cause and effect; I think there is ample evidence that they do.

13

It’s not that they don’t know cause and effect, it’s that they generally need it to be pretty immediate for the effect to be linked to the cause in their heads.

Those times when the dog seemed to feel guilty about something that had happened earlier, where they usually incidents of bad behavior (being destructive and the like), or were they things that could have been the result of or resulted in transient illness, like urinating/deficating in the house, eating a bunch of garbage and getting an upset tummy?

But all this really isn’t the point of the OP. The dog gets into the trash when your back is turned. You don’t want her to. Make the trash so she can’t get into it and give her something else to play with or play with her often and hard enough that she’s too tuckered out to fuss with the trash. Whatever her particular motivations are, the treatment course pretty much remains the same.

14

With my Weim, it was always because she chewed up a piece of furniture (with 1500 dog toys scattered around the house). This pretty much only happened when she was young, but it was always destructive behavior, not potty training issues (of which there really weren’t any). She was a really smart dog, so ymmv, but I am certain she understood when she had been bad, and if she got yelled at she knew why.

15

Okay, my dog was “kind” enough to provide me with another example of guilt behavior just this morning. This morning I woke up and looked over and Lola wasn’t in her doggy bed. She is NEVER not in her doggy bed; she gets up when I do, not a second before. I was immediately concerned. I got out of bed and started to check the living room, but I found Lola curled up at the foot of the bed on the bare floor. I looked at her with no tension in my body - I was concerned, not angry - and she gave me that sideways glance and slight tail twitch that tells me she knew she was in trouble.

Sure enough, Lola had gone poop in the living room during the night. I’d just forgotten to take her outside before we went to bed.

I could have a zillion vets say “Dogs don’t feel guilt” but I can’t just explain that behavior away. She obviously knows she’s in trouble before she’s in trouble. Hence my original question.

16

Far be it from me to try to use science to trump overwhelming anecdotal evidence. :wink:
I will say this last bit and leave it at that:

To have “guilt” you have to have conciousness that something is morally wrong. You have to remember that you did the act and feel bad about doing it. Dogs don’t have that ability. They know that some acts generate disapproval from their people if they’re caught doing them, but they don’t have the ability to reflect on their actions and judge them in retrospect while simultaneously worrying about what the punishment will be once the humans find out.

17

I popped into this thread only to discuss that word. I’ve had the impression for quite a while that “tump” is slang regional to Texas. Are you in Texas?

Most of the time when I hear it, it’s referring to upsetting something floating on water. You’re sitting on an air matress in the pool, and your kids tump you over. In my estimation, most people in Texas would use the word “tump” in this situation.

So are you in Texas?

18

My dog is very food oriented. He will get not only into the kitchen trash, but will also pots and pans off of the stove if they’ve been left there, and will pull dishes out of the sink that I will later find scattered throughout the house (never once broken, amazingly enough).

When I come home from work, I usually have papers, a coffee mug, the mail, and I am fumbling around with my keys. Most of the time I get the door open and the dog is jumping up at me, inspecting any bags that I have to see if it is anything yummy, and just plain old happy to see me. If garbage has been gotten into, then as soon as I get the door open, he sneaks past me and hides in the back yard. This is before I have any knowledge of bad behavior.

I don’t know if dogs feel guilt, or how long it takes for the cause / effect relationship to wear off etc. But I DO know that when the garbage or dishes have been gotten into, the dog knows he is in trouble.

It is very dangerous for a dog to eat garbage. I have found large pieces of plastic wrap, paper towels, and zip lock bags in his poop in the yard. This stuff can bind up their intestines and kill them.

Also, no matter how well you train the dog with mouse traps or scary noises or whatever, there is no guarantee that the dog will never do it again. You must always try to remember to secure the trash from the dog.

I have gone with the two prong approach - moving the trash everyday and training as a backup in case I forget. I have trained him with the ‘pretend like your leaving but watch through the window’ trick (though I did it at night and I think I almost got the cops called on myself), and I have used the very bitter spray that they sell in pet stores. I just baited the garbage with some pork lo mein that was soaked in the bitter spray. He got into it and had a nasty surprise. I did this a few more times and he started leaving it alone.

Also, I would like to share this trash can with you. It has a lid lock feature that will keep a dog out of it. I don’t have one yet because I am lazy and haven’t gotten around to it yet, but I think it would be well worth the cost.

p.s. I have never heard the word ‘tump’. I am from Ohio.

19

Picky, picky. :wink: Really, though, what I think happywaffle and I are talking about is not really guilt in the higher sense, but the idea that dogs do know that certain behaviors will lead to punishment, even if discovered hours after the behavior happened. “Guilt” is just a convenient word. It is often claimed that it makes no sense to punish a dog for something you did not catch him in the act of doing because he could not possibly understand it, but lots of anecdotal evidence shows that at least some dogs do remember that they chewed up that chair leg and that doing so is likely to lead to some retribution. Why can you train a dog to do tricks if his memory is so poor as some suggest? It doesn’t make sense that a dog can remember certain cause/effect relationships, but not others, especially when many people have seen very obvious signs that they do make that connection reliably and regularly.

What is the scientific evidence that such connections cannot be made by canine minds?

20

Oh, a couple more things I forgot to mention.

A Kong stuffed with peanut butter and frozen is great and helps to alleviate the separation anxiety, whether or not there is a garbage problem.

Lissa’s advice is good for normal training. I have been reading a book that claims 2-3 seconds to give the dog a reward for good behavior. It seems to work well.

My dog recently ate a slab and a half of spare rib bones and about 3 packs of cigarette butts out of the trash. I was aghast when he puked it all up. It was amazing.

There was also ‘the flour incident’. I had recently purchased an antique oriental rug. I left a sack of flour on the kitchen counter. Dog eats flour on rug. Dog gets thirsty. Dog drinks water and drools A LOT. His thirst quenched he resumes eating flour. Repeat. Did you know that flour and water make paste? I now know first hand. :smack:

IANA Vet or a Dog Trainer… I am simply relating my own experiences and what I have learned from past research on the subject.