How to derail your dog’s train of thought

DEAR OLD TRAINER: We wrote you last spring about Yip, our 18-month old Lab. He was impossible on the leash until I followed your advice about making him sit and look at me every time he went wild. Now, when he acts up, I make him sit and he behaves perfectly. What I don’t understand is why. Would you please explain why the training process works so well?

A: When a young dog has not been trained, especially a young male dog, he has one interest: Having fun.

John Prine wasn’t talking about dogs when he wrote “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness,” but his line, “you’re out there running just to be on the run,” is the perfect description of how a dog feels.

Before you trained Yip, he was so excited to get to walk with you his mind was spinning at warp speed, thinking something like this:

1. Yahoo, here we go, I’m the fastest dog in the world and I’m going to …

2. Wait, I smell a cat. I’m going to veer off and kick his …

3. No, first I think I’ll jump 6 feet into the air and spin like a helicopter …

4. That was fun, now I’m going to run so hard I jerk the leash out of the boss’s hand …

5. No, before I do that I will jump up and show him how much I love him …

6. Wow, what a great jump! I licked his forehead four times. Now I will …

7. Hey, I smell a dog. I’ll bark 50 times as loud as I can and …

8. Whoa, I forgot to mark that post so I’ll make a 180-degree turn at full speed …

9. Hey, is that a mud hole? I’m going to splatter mud high as the sky …

10. Now I’ll jump on the boss again because I know he likes paw prints on his shirt …

11. Hey, I smell something dead I need to roll in so I’ll …

12. No, first I’d better circle him three times and wrap the leash around his legs …

That’s as much fun as a dog can have and dogs love to have fun, so the thought pattern became a habit.

You broke the habit by interrupting his thought process every time one of those thoughts popped into his head. Disrupting the thought process is how you break a bad habit in dogs. Or humans for that matter.

Now Yip’s thought process is:

1. Yahoo, time for a walk, I am going to run so fast …

2. Oh, wait. I’d better see what the leader of the pack has in mind.

Yip learned he can have fun, plus get affection from the person he loves most, by paying attention to what you want him to do.

That’s the foundation of canine psychology – the members of the pack are happy to obey the wishes of the leader as soon as they know who the leader is. It is reassuring to any dog to know what the rules are and what the leader wants

Making your dog sit and look at you to interrupt bad behavior the instant it occurs solves any behavior problem once you convince your dog you are the leader.

This story was originally published January 11, 2017 at 4:42 PM with the headline "How to derail your dog’s train of thought."