Creating structure and boundaries for your dog.
If you are like most pet parents, you take a lot of pleasure in making your dog happy and hate to cause discomfort or stress. However, unless you want to spend your life with your dog trying to control everything about their environment, teaching them to respond appropriately to stressors will make life a lot more pleasant for both of you.
Here's what you need to know about instilling boundaries and why this is such a critical exercise for you and your dog.
Why Are Structuring And Boundaries Important For Your Dog?
Small doses of controlled stress give your dog the skills they need to handle greater stress later in life. It's no fun to deliberately cause your puppy or dog stress, but in the end, small doses of controlled stress are much healthier for your dog than a life of anxiety.
How to Create Structure in Your Dog’s Everyday Life
Understanding that structure is valuable is very different than incorporating it. Whether you have a puppy and are just trying to develop structure or your older dog has not had the structure they've needed since puppyhood, building boundaries has challenges.
That said, you may find it easier than you expect. Here are some tricks that work well whether you have a puppy or an older dog.
Control Feeding
Eating is one of the most exciting things in the life of the average dog. Aggression around food, especially high-value food, is one of the most common problems to develop even in well-socialized household dogs.
Therefore, controlling your dog's food and giving them a high degree of comfort about food security is extremely valuable. Here are a few ways that you can control feeding and teach your dog that they do not need to be anxious about their food, even the most delicious prizes.
Give and Take Games
Give and take games are a great way to teach your dog to have the right kinds of feelings around their food. It used to be customary in many circles of dog training to say that a dog's food should never be interfered with. While this is certainly good advice for anyone who doesn't know a given dog, when it comes to your own dog, the opposite advice is true. You should always be able to put your hand in your dog's food bowl.
More importantly, if a child or somebody else unexpectedly reaches into your dog's food bowl, they should not be met with a growl, much less a bite. Whatever age your dog is, you can begin teaching them to have the right attitude around food.
1. Offer your hand with a small amount of your dog’s regular food in a closed fist. Let your dog worry at your hand, trying to get you to release the food. Wait until they stop trying and look at you. Give the command to take, open your hand, and let them have the food.
2. Put a small amount of food in your dog's bowl. Give the command to take and give them the food. Offer them a very tantalizing treat and give the command to give. Briefly take away the food bowl as they eat the delicious treat, then return it.
3. Repeat and increase the stakes. Repeat this process as many times as it takes for you to feel confident that your dog values whatever you have more than whatever they have. Try different items at different times. This training will serve you well if your dog gets ahold of something they shouldn't, and it will also make your dog very steady if anyone interferes with their food. It's important that everybody in the family practice this essential training.
You can easily make an alteration of this training technique if you use a food distributing toy. For dogs that already have some problem behavior around their food bowl, food distributing toys can automatically reinforce the kind of behavior that you want.
All you have to do is show your dog some of your incredible human skills in opening a food distributing toy. Your dog will be so impressed at how good you are at getting to the goodies that they will bring you the toy over and over.
You can request that your dog give you the food toy because they can feel confident that you will bring some new good things from it. Practice the give-and-take games using the toy, asking your dog to surrender it in exchange for delectable treats as well as showing them how well you can help them get food out of the toy.
Structured Walks
For most dogs, going on a walk is one of the most enjoyable activities in life. The walk is innately rewarding, but it can also be overwhelming for dogs.
Many dogs experience problem behavior more on the walk than at other times, and some dogs only exhibit problem behavior on the walk. Here are some tips to ensure structured walks that will be beneficial for you and your dog.
Exercise First
It isn't reasonable to ask a dog to show self-control and walk nicely on the leash if they have not had sufficient opportunity to exercise. Play with your dog or run with them so that your dog can get the wiggles out before you ask them to show greater self-control.
Once your dog is tired enough to sit easily on command and look to you for treats, they'll be ready to walk on the lead.
Pulling is Never Allowed
It is completely natural for dogs to pull on the lead to try to get where they are going. The more often they are allowed to pull and have it rewarded by getting where they want to go, the harder it will be to convince them to stop pulling.
A dog that is pulling isn't practicing self-control. Having the lead constantly put pressure on the neck or harness encourages increasingly frantic behavior, which can turn into leash reactivity. This is why so many dogs that play well with other dogs and meet people nicely off-leash have behavior problems on leash.
Whenever your dog tries to pull, simply turn and walk in the other direction. This can be very frustrating at the beginning, but in time, your dog will learn that the best way to go where they want to go is to walk nicely on the lead and be patient.
Schedule and Consequences
Dogs are happiest when they have a routine to follow. Feeding, walking, playing, etc at about the same time or following the same cues is comforting. On the other hand, your life won't always be able to go according to either you or your dog's ideal schedule.
Therefore, it's a good idea to alternate periods of unexpected fun, training, and alone time with scheduled activities. The schedule can also follow behavior from your dog.
When dogs behave poorly, such as repeatedly refusing to follow commands that they have learned in a specific context, it's important that there are consequences to their behavior. These consequences shouldn’t be punishment. Rather, they should equip your dog to do better next time.
Give your dog some alone time with a good chew or food-distributing toy whenever they are feeling a bit rebellious. That way, your dog will learn to calm down and self-correct when he would rather be disobedient. As an added benefit, you won't have to worry about becoming impatient with your dog’s disobedience.
Remember that dogs don’t take long to change modes. After a few moments of crate time, let your dog out and see if they’re ready to follow commands and be calm in the house.
Enjoy a Confident Dog
When dogs learn structure and boundaries throughout their life, they are more confident and outgoing and have fewer anxieties and behavior problems. At the beginning, it can be hard to instill boundaries, but as you begin to see the benefits, it will get easier and easier to cause your dog small amounts of stress under your supervision in return for the overwhelming benefits of a dog that is confident and self-controlled.