I’ve used positive reinforcement training with my dog from the start. It’s worked wonders; it’s not stressful at all, it produces results, I don’t resent my dog and she doesn’t resent me. Yes, she fucks up sometimes but I fully understand that all people and animals do, and she doesn’t realize what she did wrong, and I don’t hold it against her.
One day a friend was leaving and she was pupping around the door excitedly. I told him to be careful not to let her out because she’ll go run around the neighborhood for a few minutes and it’ll be hard to get her back in.
He turned around, came back in the house, and said to me in all earnesty, “You know what you do? Take her over to the door and yell NO! over and over until she gets it.”
Yeah, because I want my dog to be:
-Scared of the door
-Scared of going outside
-Scared of me
-Confused as hell
I read somewhere about someone who tried the old “rub their nose in it” technique of discouraging dogs from going to the bathroom inside. The next day, when they came home, the dog walked over to the mess it had made that day and put its nose in it.
My parents are horrible about feeding their dog from the table. At some point she started barking at them if they weren’t making with the tidbits fast or often enought.
So now, they just very firmly say “NO” when she barks–and then immediately give her something to eat. :rolleyes:
I think I may bring headphones to Thanksgiving dinner this year.
Trying to train my cats to do anything is like trying to teach elk to fly small aircraft. I fully understand this and have just come to accept that they will do things the way they do them and I put up with it in exchange for their permission to pet their bellies.
I had one person tell me that to keep the cats from climbing on me at night I should put them in their cat carriers and shut them in another room until I wake up. Yeah, that is a great idea…shut them away from food, water, and litter for 8 hours at a time in their carriers (which they associate with being carried out into the city and going to the vet) so that they are hungry and scared and covered in their own filth by the time I get up. :rolleyes:
I’ve heard the “shut them away and ignore them” advice for training cats before… inevitably, it turns out that the person giving advice doesn’t actually HAVE cats, but swears up and down that it totally worked for their cousin’s friend’s roomates’ aunt.
They’re nocturnal creatures, and perverse untrainable ones to boot.
I’m pretty sure that technique would only serve to train my cats to hide in the smallest, darkest, hardest to reach nook in the house roughly 5 minutes before bedtime so that I can’t put them in the carrier. :rolleyes:
Once when I was buying some cat food at PetSmart a woman came over to me and started a tirade about how awful is to feed meat, fish, or poultry to cats. She said that a vegan diet was “the natural way.”
Yeah, sure, lady. I’ll just put the kitties out to graze in the pasture. :rolleyes:
We once lost a deal on the sale of a house because the owners were a working couple with three dogs that they put in the basement before they went to work and let upstairs after they went home. The dogs were down there all day with no food, water, company or walks. The owners never went into the basement for seven years!
When the home inspector insisted on seeing the basement he had to report the “hazadous condtion” to the Health Dept. And the buyers cancelled the deal.
Cats fed a vegetarian or vegan diet will go blind and eventually die. There’s an amino acid called taurine that they need and can only get from animal products. If you had an outdoor cat, you might be able to get away with a vegetarian or vegan diet, since the cat would get the animal products it needed by catching rodents or birds. But the cat wouldn’t really be vegetarian or vegan then, so what’s the point?
ETA: My Katya does graze, though. Sometimes we’ll get her one of those little containers of pet grass, and she’ll nibble on it. But she still eats regular cat food, too.
That seems excessive. Why not just shut them out of the bedroom, if the problem is them climbing on you at night?
This was when I got my first cat and he was about 10 weeks old so my choices were a kitten climbing on my face all night or listening to him scream outside the bedroom. After a few weeks he calmed down and slept on the pillow like a normal cat but I couldn’t believe someone would recommend that I put him in his carrier in the laundry room or whatever just because I was kind of inconvenienced for a short time.
I try not to take any dog training advice from my mother. Her large dog runs the house.
A recent example:
She was complaining because Lucky-dog kept standing on her foot. Now he’s a big dog. Big as in “Irish Wolfhound travelling salesdog visited the farmhouse one day” big. He’s big enough that he was bruising her foot.
Anyway, she was making sandwiches in the kitchen, and I watched Lucky come up to her, peruse the situation carefully, and then quite deliberately stomped on her foot. I mean, he jumped up and landed on her foot like he was trying to pop a toe off.
My mom exclaimed “OW!!!” and promptly popped a piece of cheese into his mouth.
Classic training. She had trained him to stomp on her foot like it was a cheese delivery device. I explained this to her
To this day, he still stomps on her, and she still professes to not understand why he does that.
One of our pets is an English Bulldog. We live in Arizona. As much as I like Caesar Milan for the most part, the next time some idiot who’s seen too many episodes of The Dog Whisperer tells me to make sure I take Sydney for at least a 45 minute walk every day, I swear I’m going to slug them.
Bulldogs are the absolute worst in terms of overheating. Even in mild climates, 45 minutes is pretty much a maximum when it comes to exercising them. Sydney and our other dog get plenty of exercise and attention, but they get them under controlled outside time (in the summer, lots more time and activities outside in the other three seasons) and lots of indoor play.
This sounds like you might be remembering the story I’ve shared here about my grandfather’s old dog: Max. Max never did get properly housebroken. He’d spend the nights in the kitchen, and would always be up before my grandparents. And he couldn’t wait. So he’d make a pile in the middle of the kitchen floor. It wasn’t a one-time thing, but my grandfather swore to me that eventually Max did learn to stick his own nose in his poop.
Buy an Indian Ringneck parrot today! Let it fly loose in your apartment, which you can do if you can afford to get new furniture every other day and pay the landlord for the property damage!
Crap! I wish this thread had been around in the days my dear SO got his first-ever doggie. A border collie. Firstly; she’s WAY smarter than the two of us put together. Secondly; being a firstest doggie ever for the SO; she quickly found out how to wrap SO around her delicate, albiet decieving front paw.
We have a Border Collie that’s not allowed in the pastures, because she won’t take orders and would be kicked into the stratosphere by any of the horses (because she barks like a Banshee and runs helter skelter at the livestock, all the while singing "La La La; I can’t Hear You!). But at dinner time? She’s the world’s smartest doggie. You have a foodstuff that she would like? OOOOHHH, look at me SIT. OOOOOHH, look at me GO DOWN. Look as I take the RED ball and seperate it from the BROWN balls. LOOK at me whilst I stare you down; drooling for the morsel you have on your fork. PLUNK! here’s my food dish; I’m throwing it down at your feet so you can fill it with what you’re having for dinner. It’s pathetic, really.
