Are you using obedience commands to correct undesirable behaviours?

In behavioural dog training, there is a big distinction between obedience commands and corrections.

An obedience command is not a correction. They are two different things.

If you have problem stopping an undesirable behaviours, you should look at how you correct that behaviour.

Are you correcting the behaviour with an aversive or are you using an obedience command as if it was an aversive?

When we want a dog to stop an undesirable behaviour and that behaviour is a lot of fun for the dog (eg barking, chewing shoes, counter surfing, stealing socks, etc), the dog is not going to stop simply because we give them an obedience command (eg sit, down, place, come, etc).

To stop those behaviours effectively (meaning the dog will not choose to do them even when you don’t say anything), we need the dog to fully understand that those “fun” behaviors actually carry a very unpleasant consequence so they will not attempt to do them again — even when no one is there to tell them not to.

Ecollar is a very good training tool for this purpose because it is a unique training tool that can apply an “impersonal” correction: the dog will associate the undesirable consequences with the dog’s own decision instead of the human’s action or commands.

For example, we can condition the dog to believe that counter surfing will always lead to a very unpleasant consequence so the dog will stop trying that. Once the dog tries to pay attention to the food on the counter, the human can press the ecollar without saying a word. The human can also stay quite far and act very nonchalant during the entire process.

After a few meaningful corrections, the dog should stop counter surfing altogether. It will not affect the relationship with the human negatively because as far as the dog knows, the human has nothing to do with the correction.

When the dog has learned that it’s their decision that has caused the correction, they will stop making that inappropriate decision on their own, so no more correction is needed.

Obedience commands are personal. They are associated with the human; but ecollar corrections can be impersonal and associated only with the inappropriate choices made by the dogs. This is one of the biggest benefits of ecollar training.

Hope this helps.

Thank you.