Last weekend we went to an agility show in Dunedin. It was surreal after three weeks of lockdown to be able to go to another town and hang out with all my agility friends. The actual agility side of things didn’t go so well – Rik and I are both a bit rusty as I haven’t been doing very much with her over the winter – but we had fun anyway.
During lockdown, Able made the exciting discovery that he could lift his leg and pee on things, instead of just standing in the middle of the lawn and lifting it on nothing. As with any cool new trick, he’s eager to try out his ninja peeing-on-things ability whenever he gets the chance. Until this point bushes and lampposts were his go-tos … but at the agility show he decided to add cars to his repertoire.
I do not want my puppy to pee on cars. While I don’t really mind other dogs peeing on my car, other people do mind so for the sake of courtesy he needs to leave cars alone. I also don’t want him peeing on jump wings, deck chairs, call steward boards, or myriad other vertical surfaces in the agility environment. And I don’t want him to pee on buildings either – the outside but especially when he’s inside an indoor agility venue.
This means that I need to be proactive about interrupting him before he pees on something inappropriate. For the next few months I’ll need to pay close attention to my puppy whenever I have him out at an agility show, and move him away from things that he appears to be lining himself up with. And I may need to keep him on a shorter lead in car parks …
Never Saying “No” …
I suppose Able’s leg-lifting predilection is a good introduction to the topic of whether one should or should not use the word “No” to their dog.
I had a conversation about this last year with a friend, who thinks the movement towards never saying “No” to a dog is ridiculous. We had to agree to disagree, because I was planning to bring up my puppy without that word too.
The thing about “No” is that there’s an awful lot of ways for a puppy to be annoying, and it doesn’t tell him what he could do that would make your life easier at this precise moment. My hypothesis was that an awful lot of the time you could replace “No” with “Sit” and finish up with a better outcome – a dog that’s stopped doing the thing you didn’t want, without any need for intimidation.
If you think about how the word “No” gets its power, it has to be through intimidation. It’s usually said loudly in an angry tone, and some people follow it up with physical punishment. There isn’t a way to positively and happily train a dog to “stop doing that thing” … or even “stop doing everything”. That’s why I think “Sit” is the best substitute for it – it’s something you can train using positive reinforcement, that is also incompatible with most nuisance behaviours.
… But Doing “No” Instead
This weekend I had my puppy out and I was talking to my friend – the same one I had the “No” conversation with last year. My puppy saw another dog that he wanted to greet, and started dragging me over.
I did not want him to meet the other dog, and especially did not want him to drag me to meet the other dog. I shortened the lead and moved him out of the other dogs path, and my friend said “So you do say No!”.
I might have said “No”. I think what I actually said was more like “No we aren’t going to go and see that dog” or “No we don’t drag our owners up to strange dogs” or words to those effect.
I am a human. Humans like to verbalise a lot compared to almost any other species, and I like to verbalise more than the average human. Those words were not for my puppy’s benefit, and I doubt he was listening. The talking is just an incredibly strong default behaviour that I do a lot of the time. It made zero difference to his behaviour. I could say “No we don’t drag our owners up to strange dogs” a billion times, and have a puppy who still dragged me up to strange dogs.
But while I was saying no, I was also doing no. I physically prevented my puppy from approaching the other dog. I held the lead tight and prevented him from accessing any other reinforcement (nice smells to sniff, pats from other people nearby etc) until he chose to do two behaviours that I do like – moving closer to me to release the lead pressure, and making eye contact. I made those behaviours stronger (because after he did them I gave him a loose lead to explore the immediate vicinity) and prevented an outcome that would have made the dragging behaviour stronger.
I will keep doing this over time. All the little moments when I’ve reinforced loose leads and eye contact will add up to a strong behaviour that Able likes to offer. I’ve put a lot of effort into preventing him from doing behaviours that I don’t want (like keeping him on lead so he doesn’t learn to run away on walks, and keeping him in an ex-pen so he doesn’t chew the furniture while I’m working). Those behaviours won’t get stronger because I literally just don’t put my puppy in the situation where he can do them.
And when I do catch him doing something I don’t want? I can interrupt it and prevent him from getting reinforcement from it, and that behaviour will also weaken over time. In theory I could punish them and this would decrease the behaviour too, but this can backfire in several ways. It’s also not the relationship I want to have with my dog – I’d rather invest the effort into helping him learn better behaviours, than make him scared of me. So I’ll continue my walks around the supermarket car park to reinforce my puppy for calm behaviour when other people are nearby, and let him greet my agilty friends when he’s in a calm enough state of mind to do so “nicely”.
The Sock and Groin Bite Exceptions
I have yelled at and chased my puppy on one occasion. He’d just bitten me on the inside of the thigh while I was getting dressed. It hurt and my brain took over for thirty seconds. It doesn’t seem to have affected his relationship with me, although it has changed mine with him – I now ask him to do a sit stay while I put my pants on.
And I also use the phrase “Nah Matey” with my puppy sometimes. My plans to never ever use the word “No” disintegrated when I was trying to teach him that socks weren’t dog toys, so I came up with this as a nice way to say “No” instead (it is impossible to say in a growly voice). The positive approach here is to confiscate the sock and help the puppy find a more suitable toy to chew, but that approach is of limited use for those of us who have floodrobes.
Eventually when I’d had enough of the sock situation I decided it was time he learned how to find a better toy on his own. I said “Nah Matey”, confiscated the sock, and put it back on the floor next to him. We repeated this four or five times, and then the puppy wandered off and found a chew rope. I’ve said “Nah Matey” a few times since then when I’ve confiscated something I don’t want him to play with. Able has absolutely no visible reaction to these words – you could take a photo of the puppy a second before and a second after I say them and I doubt you would be able to see any difference in his expression. It felt like I was talking to a brick wall except … I never saw him pick up any of those items again.
Maybe it’s time to dust off “Nah Matey” as I help Able understand what is and isn’t an acceptable thing to pee on…