If your dog keeps doing the thing you keep telling it not to do, it is because the telling-off is the reward. Every time you say no, push the paws off your jumper, scoop the dog up in front of a guest, or explain to it that thunder is nothing to worry about, you hand over the three things a dog will work all day for: your voice, your hands and your eyes. The behaviour just got paid. Of course it comes back tomorrow.
I gave a talk on exactly this in my first year in business, at PetWell in Docklands, to a room of neighbours who already knew Murphy from the street. Murphy slept on her mat for the whole 27 minutes, which was the point, and the video is still on their channel. Every slide was a different behaviour with the same sentence underneath. You tell your dog off, you touch your dog. Why wouldn't your dog do it again?
The three ways you praise a dog, and the fourth you don't notice
There are three ways to tell a dog it did the right thing. Verbal, good girl. Physical, a pat. And the actual reward, a treat. Most of us use all three far too many times a day, for nothing in particular, which is why they have stopped meaning much.
There is a fourth, and it comes before the other three every single time. Before you talk to your dog you look at it. Before you pat it you look at it. Before the treat comes out, you look at it. Dogs are so good at reading us that the look on its own becomes the reward. Which means "no" is not a punishment. "No" is eye contact and your voice, aimed at the dog, at the exact moment it did the thing. From the dog's side, that is a result.
Once you see that, the next six are obvious.
1. Jumping up
What you do: "No, get down," and both hands on the dog to push it off. Or a friend walks in, the dog jumps, and the friend picks it up. Voice and touch, delivered on the jump.
What to do instead: turn your body away. The paws land on the floor by themselves. Say good, once, but don't bend down yet, because the dog is still fizzing and bending down is an invitation to go again. No eye contact, no voice, no hands until you have four paws on the ground and a dog that has stopped bouncing. Then the attention comes. Your guests do the same thing, because I can't have me doing one thing and everyone who walks through my door doing another. That is not a stubborn dog. That is two rules.
2. Barking at the door
What you do: look at the door, "enough, that's enough," maybe pull the dog back by the collar. Eyes, voice, hands.
What is actually happening: the dog is alerting the pack, and you are the pack. Watch it next time. Your dog barks at the noise outside and then turns around to look at you. Are you going to do something about it? The moment you start shouting, the dog goes, great, we're a pack now, we bark together. Keep cooking. Keep typing. Don't look up. The dog works out that there's no point alerting, my pack's not responding. If nobody responds to the fire alarm, the fire alarm goes away. (If your dog is on patrol at the window all day, that is a different problem with a different fix, and I have written about it here.)
3. Not coming when called
What you do: say come, the dog doesn't, so you get up and walk towards it. The dog backs away, and now you are playing chasey in the park with a much faster animal.
Watch two dogs invite each other to play. They never do it face to face. One turns and moves off, the other follows. So if I want to say come in dog, I can't be facing the dog when I say it. If the lead ever snaps or the gate gets left open, never chase. Four legs beat two. Make a big deal, run the other way, drop dead on the grass, and the dog will be on top of you inside ten seconds. And the rule underneath all of it: if your dog doesn't have recall, it is not off lead yet. The longer version, on why I rarely teach recall at all, is here.
4. Stealing socks
What you do: go to the dog, talk to it, hold it so you can prise the sock out. Voice, hands, and the best part of the dog's day, a chase.
Leave an indoor lead on the dog. When it grabs the sock, don't chase the dog. Chase the end of the lead and step on it. Then stand there and pretend to be on your phone. The dog can't go anywhere, you are not taking the sock, nothing is happening. Thirty seconds of that and the sock hits the floor by itself. That is the moment to reward: good decision-making. You paid for the let-go, not the theft.
5. Whining at the cafe
What you do: "It's okay, it's okay, we're going soon," while your hand pats the dog on repeat and a bit of the toastie goes under the table. Voice, touch, food.
The more the dog whines, the longer you stay, because now you are waiting for it to stop. Disengage completely. Wait for quiet. Then move on. Murphy has sat under a lot of cafe tables in her assistance vest, and the reason she can is that nobody at the table has ever talked to her while she was making a noise.
6. The scared dog
What you do: treat it like a child. "It's okay, it's just thunder. It's okay, it's just a statue." Pick it up. Pat it. Offer it a treat it won't take.
What you are telling the dog is that it's okay to be scared, and every pat confirms that this is a moment worth being scared in. So: no talking, no touching, no food. I restrict movement instead. Foot on the indoor lead, so the dog can't spin and pace and wind itself up further. There is no tension on the lead and no hand on the dog, so nothing is being fed. The dog is scared, that's fine, wait. You know what your dog looks like when it's scared and you know what it looks like when it isn't. Wait for the second one, then reward that.
Timing is the whole thing
None of this is about being cold. It is about when. A friend at brunch once asked if she could give Murphy a liver treat, because she was giving her own dog one. Why? Murphy was not doing anything. If she had been staring at a bird at that moment, the treat would have landed on the stare, and the next thing to happen is a lunge at the bird.
During that talk I caught myself getting it wrong. Murphy walked herself to her mat and lay down while I was busy with the room, and I missed it. By the time I noticed, she was asleep. If I went over and patted her then, she'd have gone, what's this for, I'm sleeping. I was not rewarding the decision any more, I was just waking my dog up. Reward the choice when the dog makes it. Ten minutes later is not late, it's a different event.
What this is not
It is not ignoring your dog all day. Before the talk started I was patting Murphy the whole time, because she was calm and I felt like it. What I don't do is fuss at the wrong moment: pat a dog that is jumping, talk to a dog that is barking, feed a dog that is whining, cuddle a dog that is panicking. The pats are for the dog on the ground, the quiet dog, the dog that just chose the mat.
And notice that none of the six fixes needed a command. No sit, no leave it, no place. You turned, you stood on a lead, you kept cooking, you waited. The dog worked out the rest, which is the only kind of learning that lasts. There are no bad dogs, only confused dogs, and most of the confusion is that we keep paying for the thing we want to stop.
If your dog is doing four of the six, you don't need a longer list. You need someone to watch your hands for ninety minutes. That is the consultation.
Common questions
Won't ignoring the barking make it worse at first?
Yes, for a day or two. A dog that has been paid for barking for a year will bark harder when the payment stops, the way you press a broken lift button a few more times before you take the stairs. Hold the line through that and it drops away. Answer it once in the middle of the burst and you have taught the dog the new price.
Isn't it cruel to ignore a dog that is scared?
You are not ignoring the dog, you are ignoring the fear. Your foot is on the lead, you are right there, and the moment the body loosens you are the first to say so. What would be unkind is telling a frightened animal, with your hands and your voice, that it is right to be frightened.
Does this work for puppies?
Puppies are where it works fastest, because nothing has been paid for yet. A ten-week-old that jumps and gets a turned back learns the floor in a week. A three-year-old that has been picked up for jumping since it was that size takes longer, but the mechanism is the same.
What if my partner keeps doing the old thing?
Then the dog is being trained by two people with two rules, and it will keep doing whatever works on the softer one. Both handlers, same rule, or the behaviour stays. This is the conversation I have in almost every consultation and it is rarely about the dog.