Disciplining your dog with patience

We love our pets—that’s a given. But in times of stress, it can be difficult to be patient with them.

Pets act out; it’s only natural. They have personalities, quirks, things they love doing whether or not you’ve tried a thousand times to train them out of doing it. There will be points in the day where they’ve snuck into your cupboard and chewed your shoes, or managed to pee on the bed, or eaten half the bag of treats you put back in the drawer but didn’t close as well as you should have. And while it’s important to discipline them, it shouldn’t come out of a place of frustration or anger. And it especially shouldn’t lead to actions you’ll regret.

In this article, we’ll talk to you about disciplining your dog with love and patience, using positive reinforcement instead of punishment.

Why punishment doesn’t work

Disciplining your dog matters, but punishment is an ineffective means of doing it. Several people believe that shouting loudly at a dog can get them to listen to you. When that doesn’t work, they resort to hitting—they assume the more scared the dog is, the more likely they are to not repeat the behavior.

But negative reinforcement has severe drawbacks. For one, your dog may be scared but they may also be confused about what exactly you expect them to do. Remember, dogs don’t speak our language. Simply shouting has the effect of unnerving them, and they may become anxious. It’s an anxiousness that can lead to more ‘out-of-line’ behavior, such as peeing around the house or shredding shoes and objects in nervousness. This, in turn, can lead to more shouting from your end—do you see where we’re going with this? It’s a vicious cycle.

Hitting your dog is also a bad idea. For one, you’ll feel terrible after you do it. You may tell yourself it’s in the interests of discipline and you have to do it, but watching your poor pet slink away with their tail between their legs is enough to wring any heart, especially that of a pet parent. Like shouting, hitting is also non-specific; it just teaches your dog to be scared in general, and over time, to grow scared of you.

It’s based on faulty science

Look, you say, I’ve been to all the dog experts and they say hitting a dog is good when it’s in the interests of discipline. They say that not hitting a dog is to be too lenient and your dog will grow up spoilt. We hear you: no one wants to raise a badly trained dog. But a lot of what was believed to be ‘necessary punishment’ was based on now-debunked science .

Most dog trainers advocated punishment on the basis of establishing yourself as the ‘alpha’. Don’t let the dog run all over you, they said. Be assertive . But that theory was based on understandings of wolf behavior in the 1960s, where scientists believed that wolves fought each other to establish an ‘alpha’, the dominant male of the pack.

Later, it was discovered that the study was conducted on wolves in captivity . When it comes to wolves out in the wild, the notion of the alpha doesn’t hold true. Instead, wolves function like us: in families . Packs don’t have a dominate male leading a bunch of similarly aged males and females. Instead they have parents and pups, and the pups follow the parents as they would in any human family (when, an ideal human family anyway). When the cubs grow up to an age where they can pair off and mate, they are dispersed from the pack, find other dispersed wolves, find a mate and have some pups to form a new pack.

In short, simple pack hierarchy is a myth. You don’t have to be the ‘alpha’. You can just be a pet parent, guiding them assertively and kindly.

How to discipline your dog assertively and kindly

When you catch your dog in the midst of doing something naughty, it’s important to show your disapproval. Speak to them in a firm tone of voice. They’ll come to associate this voice with disciplining and will know when to listen. Be as clear as you can in communicating what your dog did wrong. You can ‘punish’ them with ‘time-outs’ or by being stand-offish so that they know you’re upset.

Training them should involve positive reinforcement. Positive reinforcement is a method by which you reward your dog for the behavior to like to see. Rewards usually involve treats. (If you have an exceptionally well-behaved dog, you can break regular-sized treats into smaller pieces so that your dog isn’t eating too much.) Each time your dog gets rewarded, they’ll understand this is behavior you’d like to see more of and they’ll keep doing it.

Losing your patience with your dog

We opened this article by talking about how one can grow short-tempered in times of stress. Lockdown may be such a time for you, and you may find yourself losing your temper more and more with your pet if they’re acting out. Here’s how to keep your cool and stay patient:

1. Each time you grow frustrated with your pet, remember all the unseen factors that may be stressing you out and causing you to overreact in this moment. Take a minute. Breathe. Remember your dog doesn’t know that lockdown is a hard time for you and that there’s a pandemic going on. They’re just being their silly, lovable self.

2. Remember that training a dog is hard and takes time. Learned behavior takes repeated action and your dog may need some more time before they ‘get’ it. It doesn’t mean they aren’t trying or willfully ignoring their training.

3. Keep in mind your dog’s context. For example, maybe they’re stressed because their routine has been upended. Maybe they’re sensing that you’re anxious, which is making them anxious and causing them to act out. Perhaps they have excess energy and need to get out of the house but can’t. Context will help put the misdeed in perspective and calm you down.

We also recommend hugging your pet as often as possible and just generally doing goofy things with them. This has nothing do with disciplining; it’s just a public service announcement in times of COVID-19. There’s no better stressbuster than a pet cuddle and nothing more calming than playing with your dog. You have a pet in your family that loves you and thinks better of you than any human being would—enjoy it!