Not Even Once

One of the reasons it’s important to remain engaged and aware of your dog’s behavior is because you’re trying to build a model to base future training on. For your current dog and the next. To do this, you have to spend time thinking about it, writing it down, and ensuring that you actually understand it. Otherwise the lessons will be lost and you’ll make the same mistakes again.

As a result, this particular insight is not something for the first time dog owner since it requires future knowledge. The insight is: the ideal strategy behind all dog training should be to mitigate issues before they even arise. You need to know where certain behaviors lead and either avoid them or control them to ensure your dog behaves properly. Thus the title of this post, “not even once”. I have another blog called Nothing Definitive where I’ve talked about this before on the human side specifically in relation to unhealthy eating and other willpower-based life improvements.

If you’re unable to stop a bad behavior, you need to recognize it right away and develop a strategy. Don’t shrug it off and don’t wait for it to happen a few more times. Behavior can set in quickly if you’re not careful. Recognize the behavior and the associated body language or triggers and catch it in the moments before it happens. Most people tend to scold after the crime is committed, but this is an amateur approach. You need to recognize the subtle elements that lead up to a bad behavior and intervene in those brief seconds. This will break the sequence and the dog will succeed at altering its behavior in a positive direction (assuming you give it one).

Unfortunately, this is hard to do as a first-time dog owner or a dog owner that didn’t pay close attention the first time around. You’ll make mistakes and be forced to deal with the fallout, but that’s perfectly natural. There are numerous behaviors that Ellie does that I should have stopped earlier on, had I known. Many of them seemed innocuous or even cute at the time, but  actually lead to behaviors that weren’t ideal. This is why it’s important to pay attention and ruminate on what you observe.