Thoughts On Dog Punishment

A lot of dog owners use punishment as a technique to train a dog. There’re many ways of punishment that can take: verbal, physical or postural. A dog will see any kind of punishment as an unsuitable action perpetrated on it and may or may not associate the punishment with the dog behavior that the human is annoyed with especially whenever the punishment isn’t doled out right away as the behavior is being done.

For example, an owner comes back home to discover that the dog has overturn the dustbin and spilt over entirely the contents everywhere the house and screams at the dog and maybe hits the dog. The dog does not understand that the behavior of getting into the dustbin has anything at all to do with the owner screaming or hitting him. The dog will just associate the coming back of “the master” with the fact that the master was displeased with the dog and the physical and verbal punishment will cause the dog frightening of the owner coming back home.

Punishment that’s verbal, physical or postural toward a dog will have an eroding result on the faith that a dog has in being handled fairly by “the master”. The dog will begin to fear the hand whenever physical punishment are used and will begin to shrink anytime the hand approaches the dog even if the owner’s hand is getting towards the dog to pet the dog.

Whenever punishment is the technique you decide to use in disciplining misbehavior in a dog it’s better that the “sensed punishment” not come from you, but comes from the dog’s environment. This is how come noise works well as a punishment. Once the dog is “caught in the move”, acting a behavior that’s unsuitable and the human can snap a shake can, an air horn, or another loud noise-maker and make the noise sound as soon as the dog is having the behavior BUT do so in a way that the dog won’t see the owner causing the noise than the dog won’t connect the owner with the punishment. This manner the dog will keep off the behavior (so as to keep off the noise) even when the owner isn’t around.

Frequently when we catch a badly behavior after some time has passed and the dog is around at the time we discover the behave having been done, (a record book chewed, a dustbin rummaged through hours after the damage has been done) and the dog is crawling or slinking around like “guilty”, we humans think, aha! the dog knows he’s done something sorry. We would of course be wrong! A dog isn’t capable of moral judgments. They’ve no sense of right and wrong. A dog isn’t acting “guilty”, but is causing a submissive posture in reaction to a rigorous tone or a threatening posture from us.

If you and your dog are in a situation wherever any of the above sounds familiar and punishment hasn’t worked to correct the undesired dog behavior, perhaps it’s time to check up on positive reward as a tactic for shaping your dog’s behavior.