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Written by Admin
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Thursday, 24 November 2005 |
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Page 3 of 4
Most experts advise against punishing dogs when they eliminate indoors, at least
during the early part of the housebreaking process. This is not because they
believe all punishment is necessarily inhumane, but because when it comes to
housebreaking, punishment can very easily create more problems than it solves.
If a dog is punished for urinating or defecating, especially before it really
understands where it is supposed to eliminate, quite often it will simply learn
not to eliminate when people are watching. It may actually begin to avoid
eliminating when its owners bring it outside. Then, when the dog is indoors, it
will look for an opportunity to hide and relieve itself, creating a mess in a
place where the owners may not find it until hours or even days later. This can
make house-training much more difficult than it needs to be.
Another extremely common mistake is for owners to punish a dog for eliminating
in the house when they have not actually caught the dog in the act. If the owner
finds a mess on the floor and goes to find the dog and scold it, the dog will
believe it is being punished for whatever it was doing when the owner found it.
Dogs are totally incapable of associating the punishment with their eariler
actions, even if their owner drags them to the mess and points it out to them.
Punishing a dog when it cannot understand what the punishment is for only makes
it confused and upset, possibly creating entirely new behavioral problems.
One traditional method of punishment - rubbing the dog's nose in its own mess -
is particularly counter-productive. As noted above, dogs and wolves have a
natural urge to eliminate where the rest of their pack does. They locate the
spot by scent; this is why dogs will generally spend some time sniffing the
ground before they relieve themselves. Thus, rubbing the dog's nose in its urine
or feces actually reinforces to the dog that it should continue eliminating in
that particular spot.
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