Hey - do you have some great stories about Dogs and the Law of Attraction?
I have my two miniature pinscher puppies and they are a handful! However, if I keep affirming that I WILL keep getting incidents that lead me to say 'they're a handful!' Okay, I'm stopping that! hahaha
Truth is they are coming along and, in fact, have made great strides towards becoming great family members.
Any advice? Love to hear your pooch stories.
K.
1 comment:
Greetings,
I’m a behavior consultant and dog trainer in the San Diego area, and I believe that good guidance and training go hand-in-hand with the Law of Attraction and animals.
When people begin their journey with an animal it’s important to understand that the animals are on their own path, and that doesn’t necessarily translate to our comfort and pleasure.
Specifically in terms of your own dogs, (and all dogs for that matter) they are doing what works for them to attain the things that are important to them.
Since you didn’t say what the problems were, I am going to guess that with that breed, they are high energy, bark a lot, and may have housetraining issues.
Since the LoA can only influence our own experiences, it’s important to consider that if you want to live in harmony with your dogs, you must first understand they are living as dogs would live, and doing what it takes to help them be happy and achieve the things they want.
With that in mind, consider the following:
If you give attention to a problem, you will get more of the problem… let’s say barking. If you tell your dogs, “No, quiet,” when they bark, you will actually be reinforcing the barking by giving it attention, and you will get more barking. The “want” for the dog is often attention, so even if it’s sub-optimal attention, it’s still attention from the thing that matters most in a dog’s life—his or her human.
This is exactly the problem that arises between humans and dogs all the time and fills shelters with unwanted animals. If you then add the fact that the two different species—dogs and humans--communicate differently, the problems are then compounded.
With these communication differences, we often step over the dog’s boundaries and invade their space, without ever asking if it’s okay to do so, and yet, we don’t want our dogs to cross our boundaries, as in jumping, housetraining issues, etc. For the dog, it must seem like we are a little out of control and misbehaving all the time, since we don’t try to understand they body language and signals that clearly explain how they feel about things.
To help bridge the communication gap, I highly recommend the DVD and book: ON TALKING TERMS WITH DOGS: CALMING SIGNALS 2ND. ED., by Turid Rugaas. This book and DVD will help you understand many of the signals that dogs use to “talk” to us about how they feel about something.
Understanding your dog’s communications is important if you are to help your dogs with their problems. Look at it this way, if you had a visitor from another county that didn’t speak English, would you yell at the person because he or she didn’t understand you? Most people would find someone to help them interpret, or get a good conversion dictionary. With dogs, we just assume they should know what we want, but they don’t understand our language until we actually teach them what different words mean.
Training your dog using only positive reinforcement methods, (which means no yelling at dogs) and learning to understand the signs and signals your dog uses to convey emotions, is your conversion dictionary.
Another wonderful book is called, STRESS IN DOGS, by Martina Scholz & Clarissa von Reinhardt and also helps humans to understand how stressful it can be for dogs living with humans that don’t understand the physical and mental needs of dogs.
If you want to add more specifics to the problems you are having, I can address that as well.
Nan Arthur, CDBC, CPDT
www.wholedogtraining.com
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