How do you train a yappy dog not to bark at every little thing?
I'm genuinely not asking for myself ... I've never had a dog, only a succession of cats ... but a fellow tenant has a relatively small dog that yaps, as I said, at every little thing. If the dog is alone in the apartment, all it takes is somebody walking past in the hallway to set it off. And the other day, the tenant was waiting for the elevator with a basket of laundry, and for some reason the apartment door opened (I think a relative might have been visiting) and the dog shot out into the hallway, sounding off as if it was trying to repel invading Vikings. The woman looked furious and muttered something under her breath.
I think she also dog-sits her son's dog and I've seen her in action with one of them --- can't remember which, hers or her son's. She was trying to get the harness on so they could go outside; the dog was flinching backwards and she kept yelling and grabbing at it. The one thing I do know is that if you call a dog to you and it comes to you and you punish it -- the dog won't understand that it's being punished for, say, running away and will only connect the punishment with coming to you. So instead of encouraging the dog to come forward so she could get the harness on, she was becoming steadily angrier, and of course the dog didn't understand why, or what it was doing wrong.
The last dog I had any real contact with was my late mother's dog, a German shepherd/wolf mix. She (the dog) was extremely intelligent, and my mother's training (she'd been carefully schooled in training a wolf cross by the breeder) really brought out the dog's best qualities. So ... I've been spoiled when it comes to already-trained dogs. And as a longtime cat owner who's never even attempted to train her cats, I have no idea how she would go about training a dog -- especially trying to break it of bad habits.
And no, I don't plan to give her any advice. The mood she's been in for the last few weeks (long story and not related to this query), I doubt she'd listen anyway.
I'm genuinely not asking for myself ... I've never had a dog, only a succession of cats ... but a fellow tenant has a relatively small dog that yaps, as I said, at every little thing. If the dog is alone in the apartment, all it takes is somebody walking past in the hallway to set it off. And the other day, the tenant was waiting for the elevator with a basket of laundry, and for some reason the apartment door opened (I think a relative might have been visiting) and the dog shot out into the hallway, sounding off as if it was trying to repel invading Vikings. The woman looked furious and muttered something under her breath.
I think she also dog-sits her son's dog and I've seen her in action with one of them --- can't remember which, hers or her son's. She was trying to get the harness on so they could go outside; the dog was flinching backwards and she kept yelling and grabbing at it. The one thing I do know is that if you call a dog to you and it comes to you and you punish it -- the dog won't understand that it's being punished for, say, running away and will only connect the punishment with coming to you. So instead of encouraging the dog to come forward so she could get the harness on, she was becoming steadily angrier, and of course the dog didn't understand why, or what it was doing wrong.
The last dog I had any real contact with was my late mother's dog, a German shepherd/wolf mix. She (the dog) was extremely intelligent, and my mother's training (she'd been carefully schooled in training a wolf cross by the breeder) really brought out the dog's best qualities. So ... I've been spoiled when it comes to already-trained dogs. And as a longtime cat owner who's never even attempted to train her cats, I have no idea how she would go about training a dog -- especially trying to break it of bad habits.
And no, I don't plan to give her any advice. The mood she's been in for the last few weeks (long story and not related to this query), I doubt she'd listen anyway.
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