Making Calm Behaviors Rewarding
Through cues or volunteered behaviors, making the calm behaviors rewarding for your dog is crucial to getting more calm behaviors. It sounds so simple, right?
If your dog is easily excitable it’s much harder to practice. That being said putting in the effort to work on this consistently, will pay off!!
Examples of making calm behaviors rewarding for your dog, run a huge range of things, but anything from sitting and giving attention before you a door is opened to catching the dog laying down relaxing and dropping some kibble on the bed w them, to only petting a dog that isn’t jumping. Greeting people or dogs after being able to release focus and with a calm mind. (Instead of pulling towards them)
Often people make the mistakes of understanding what the dog wants, and allowing the dog to achieve the goal - anything from attention through jumping to sniffing through pulling. This unintentially rewards the dog for doing the unwanted behavior. Instead when we identify what the dog wants, we should see it as an opportunity to work as a team. We should teach the dog how we would like them to achieve this goal. We want to allow the dog to achieve their goals through mutally beneficial behaviors. For example, your dog wants sniff a tree or greet the neighbor on leash. If you allow them to pull you over to the scent on the tree or to the neighbor they will find pulling worked well for them and are likley to repeat the behavior of pulling. Instead if we get the dogs attention at a distance, and than move towards the goal together withouth tension (or with less tension) in the leash they will be more likley to repeat this. With repitions, they will be highly likley to check in with you before trying to get to these things.
️It is crucial to note, that the body position (sit or down) is way less important then the state of mind. Humans tend to getcaught up on the sits & downs, and that is great an all, but with enough reps and calm enough dog they are likley to volunteer these. I don’t have any probelm with asking them to do so and rewarding if they can, but if they do not / can not … it is important to take this as information about how your dog is feeling in the situation. Put differently, I’d rather reward a calm standing dog then a sifting excited dog and forcing a dog to sit doesn’t make it calm. Teaching a dog to sit, can be the beginning of calmer behaviors, and a dog that cannot sit can be informative of their excitement level. I’m about to wander into another topic… bc there’s so much connection here.
The bottom line is dogs repeat behaviors that they find rewarding, and we like calm behaviors so it is not in our interest to reward excited behaviors. It doesn’t benefit us or our dogs to reinforce behaviors that are very excited, by giving the dog a life reward.