You’ve gotta use the smaller breed of aunt, the kind that you find in an aunt farm.
I just read today about someone who lets her beloved pit bull out the back door every night and lets him back in in the morning.
They don’t have a fence.
Her pit bull runs around the neighborhood unsupervised all night, and she says he “needs to be free.”
It’s infuriating.
Sailboat
We hear the same sometimes with our pug. Yes, she could use more exercise, but pugs don’t exactly have the world’s most robust respiratory systems. Couple that with puggish stubbornness, and you get the reason for the adage, “Never walk your pug farther than you’re willing to carry her.” When she overheats or gets exhausted, she’ll simply stop and refuse to budge one step.
My sister is trying to train her shitzu-something-cross dogs to not jump up on guests when they come over. Part of her training is training house guests on what to do with the jumping dogs. You know what? I’m 41 years old - my training is damned near complete. You need to train your dogs in a way that doesn’t involve handing a booklet to everyone who comes in the door.
We kick our cats out of the bedroom every night. They usually go on their own before we kick them out - cats like routine, and they’re used to not sleeping in there. If we ever get a new kitten, they’ll be trained to sleep outside of the bedroom too. Cats don’t need to sleep with you.
Putting your cats to bed with your knitting is always a winner.
Wellll . . . to be fair, I don’t know what you’re doing but if you’re reaching down, petting the dog, telling it it’s so cute, etc, you’re really fucking your sister up. People want to do this to my dog when they come over but I try (usually in vain, sigh) to discourage them like your sister does. One of our most frequent house guests are my wife’s grandparents, and her grandmother is frail, about 90lbs, and almost 80. Our little 11lb dog could almost literally knock her over.
My dog was exhibiting some rare vocalizing while my mother-in-law was here awhile back and she kept telling the dog, “Yes! Uh-huh! Yes, you’re right!” looking at her, smiling, basically just giving her all the attention in the world and reinforcing something really annoying that I had to train out of her when I got her. I wanted to SCREEEEEEAM.
Training dogs is not rocket science. Ignore their annoying behaviors and praise them for the good ones. It’s faster and more effective than any kind of yelling/choking/nose-rubbing/obedience/dominance/show-'em-who’s-boss training and it builds a mutual respect between human and animal. Just realize they’re smart - for animals. By human standards dogs are pretty much retarded. If they don’t get something give them a break and try again later. Patience is key, but if you’re training the right way patience won’t take effort.
I agree with **Cisco **on this. The only way to train a dog not to jump on visitors is to have the visitors cooperate with the training. In other words, the visitor has to NOT reinforce the bad behavior and help reinforce the good behavior.
Having said that, if the visitor doesn’t understand dog training or doesn’t want to cooperate, it’s better to do something else with the dog. We put ours in the bedroom until they calm down.
It is a bad idea. Cruel too.
Our cats jump on the bed at night and occassionally wake us up, but not as bad as they used to. If you just gently push the cat away for awhile they get the idea. It took a week or so but Jet Jaguar (who is the youngest of our three at 7 or 8 years old) got the idea when we first got him that pawing me in the face when I’m in bed is a no no. He’ll jump on the nightstand now and wait for someone to wake up in the morning, but by that time he wants breakfast anyway. (plus by that time the other 2 are at the bedroom door waiting. As soon as they see someone awake they start the **“MEOW!FEED ME! MEOW! GOTTA EAT! MEOW! HUNGRY!” **chorus anyway.
I adopted a my dog from a rescue organization. One of the women from the rescue group came over to meet him after a week or so. She asked me how the training was going, I said it was going pretty well and we were starting to understand each other, but he was frustrating at times.
She suggested that now that he was settling in, it was time to start training him by hitting him on the face.
:eek:
Cats can breathe under water.
I’m not sure this is terrible advice (except for the part about yelling “over and over” - one command per episode is adequate). IME, dogs have a strong need to please their masters, and are in principle quite happy to take direction. Saying “No!” to a dog doesn’t make it scared of you. The dog interprets this along the lines of:
- Take-charge, assertive master - Good! He’s the alpha, that’s the way I like it.
- Master isn’t pleased - got to figure out why.
If you don’t adopt the alpha role, the dog likely will. And that’s rarely a better arrangement.
:smack: It is terrible advice, for reasons I already listed. Taking a dog over to a door and yelling at it is way too vague for them to have any idea what you’re yelling for. And dogs don’t look at humans as dogs - they’re smart enough to know that. They don’t think “either I’m the alpha or this two-legged thing is.”
But…but…if they don’t sleep in the bed with you how do you snorgle their bellies in the night? How do you tickle their paws in their sleep? How do you go to sleep without kitten kisses on your forhead? Yes, sometimes they climb on you or run around and wake you up early but mostly having kitties in the bed is a wonderful thing!
How can you keep them out when the Great Dane and the Aussie were both on the bed? It’s not like I could get up and remove just the cat.
Dunno about your cats, but I can assure you that mine don’t sleep with me.
I do the sleeping (or try to, anyways), while they take care of hunting feet under the covers, swishing faces with tails, nuzzling heads into armpits and other warm spaces, and hunting toys under the bed. I suppose there are catnaps scattered in between these activites, but no real sleeping per se. 
The worst advice I ever got was about eight years ago, I was renting an apartment and asked my landlord if I could have permission to get a dog. He said sure, with a size restriction which was entirely reasonable. Well Emma tended to bark when I was gone to work. Another tenant complained and the landlord told me I needed to control her barking. Fair enough. And then he went on to tell me I should have her vocal chords surgically cut so she wouldn’t bark.
Um no thanks. I honored my contract from the shelter and returned her. I was very sad to do so but could never in a million years seriously consider having her vocal chords cut.
BTW as is often the case with pbbth and kitties, I completely agree with her post. I cannot imagine not letting my kitties sleep with me. Especially when my husband is gone, they provide a nice warm comfort and also purr a lot.
Sorry. I side with Xema. If you can’t open a door without the dog running around the neighborhood for a few minutes, your dog isn’t trained. Your dog should be trained on what to do and not do and you do that by a strong voice and rewards. Not by making sure you don’t let him outside but making sure he knows not to GO outside. Or even come when you call him back in which he doesn’t seem to do.
You seemed more concerned about the pups “feelings” than making him a well trained addition to your family.
“Don’t worry about overfeeding them; they know how much to eat.”
This time-honored teaching has resulted in a lot of roly-poly little animals . . .
My dog is extremely well-trained, and a wonderful addition to my family, thank you. I had just gotten her at the time and she was still a pup. Like I said, a “friend” (all humans are her friends) was leaving and she was acting very excited around the door, and I knew she might want to follow him out and/or take the opportunity to go chase a bird or something, as dogs are inclined to do on occassion. Of the hundreds of times I’ve opened the door in front of my dog, she has ran outside to play 3 of them, all within 2 or 3 months of getting her. Hardly a chronic problem.
She can sit, stay, lie down, stay quiet (had to train it out of her because she barked and whined a lot when I got her), not beg (had to train it out of her because she begged badly when I got her), go where I point, come to me, roll over, etc etc and I’ve never had to use a strong voice with her.
I disagree with this. I think Cisco would agree with your first paragraph 100%. What he disagrees with is the method by which he should go about making sure a dog is trained on what to do and what not to do.
There is never a need to scare or intimidate an animal into behaving. Leading a dog to a door and then repeatedly yelling “No” at it is NOT going to train that dog to not door-dash. It’s going to train that dog to 1) be afraid of the door and 2) be afraid of you.
Dogs are smart - very smart, but they do NOT think like humans therefore you have to think like them to train them effectively. There is nothing wrong with a strong voice, I don’t think Cisco would disagree with that. But yelling is not acceptable. There’s just no need. They will respond more to a low (and by that I mean pitch as well as volume) voice than anything else.
Lastly, I concur: Kitties belong on beds.
Edit: forgot VB code is and not < >