I've never understood people who say dogs are hard to train. They are SO motivated by food
The first one was stupid easy to train. Food motivated and could be refocused in every situation with food. Picked up commands quickly. Would do training basically any time of day.
Second dog just stares at me if she doesn’t want to be trained or feels the task is too hard. When she gets distracted, it doesn’t matter how high of a reward I give, she won’t take it if she doesn’t want it.
Anyhow, my favorite of the dogs from my childhood was generally uninterested in what certain people wanted from her. She was more motivated by praise and the sheer joy of teamwork with her favorite people than by food.
So one day my mom (not one of this dog's favorites, through no fault of her own) sets her up to do the trick: she asks the dog to sit and places a treat on the dog's nose. The dog slowly decides she'd actually rather do something else. She tilts her head down towards the ground, the treat slides off her nose, and she leisurely walks away.
But humans want obedient dogs not ones that have their own opinions :)
Independent, great explorer and hiker, hated clear objects like she had an intifada against them and never got into trouble or destroyed stuff.
She was a good dude and would have been less fun if she was more obsequious or eager to please and predictable.
My mom had a boxer who was absolutely obsessed with her for his entire life. He was so eager to please her that she would often cue certain (benign) behaviors by accident, because he was always watching her to see if there was anything for him to do with her. He was so invested in figuring out what she wanted and in impressing her that the gentlest scolding would crush him— it could easily ruin a whole training session.
The things my mom (who is legally blind) got that dog to do were amazing. She (just a hobbyist) did dog sports with him (competitive obedience and rally) and got titles in advanced and intermediate levels. He did some 'American trick dog' stuff where he would do really gimmicky but pretty cute and impressive multi-step tricks, like going outside to fetch the mail and bring it back, or hopping into a suitcase, closing it on his own head, and lying down. He had some routine tricks that were pretty cool, like searching the house to collect all of his toys and put them away. He worked as a therapy dog in hospitals, where he was especially beloved by children, who were invariably amused and pleased that they could get a big, strange dog to do many tricks for them. He'd also do some little assistance things for my mom, like pick things up off the floor (if asked) so she didn't have to get down on her hands and knees and pat around to find them.
Unrelated to his training career, I'll never forget his watchfulness and sweetness toward my tiny old chihuahua. As you likely know, boxers can be extremely energetic dogs, but he was a calm soul as far as boxers go. While they didn't meet often, he had a special connection with my little < 5lbs Chihuahua: she trusted his gentle nature and he sympathized with her frustration with the antics of my mom's younger boxer. When the young energetic one wouldn't stop following my little one around, he'd trot in between them and quietly create some distance for her. My little old lady evidently appreciated this quite a bit, so much so that it once caused my family a scare. We always kept the big dogs and small dogs separated if the big dogs were playing, or if we were out of the house, or if no one was committed to supervising them. One day after an outing my mom panicked a little when she couldn't find my little old lady, and it turned out that she, not wanting to be alone for the long duration of a shopping trip and dinner, walked a couple steps down (at her age and size she was quite apprehensive about stairs, and typically would not cross even one or two steps) and then squeezed through the bars of a baby gate in order to nestle into a dog bed with my mom's dog. He was really an incredible dog, and his gentle, agreeable, social, other-oriented nature was certainly a big part of that.
On the other hand, that little old lady of a Chihuahua, when I met her, didn't know how to walk on a leash, resource guarded laps and bit about it, and didn't respond to my stupid attempts to scold her except by mistrusting me and avoiding me. Learning how to communicate her and win her over was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. By the end of her life she was a dog I could trust around strangers, dog and human, of all sizes and personalities, whom I could take offleash anywhere, who would wait for my signal at a crosswalk, who I could have lie down on some blankets on a table where I was eating and trust her when I walked out of the room, and whom I learned to read for the tiniest signals: eye contact, pointing at what she wanted with her eyes, inaudible growls/whines I could only feel because she was in my lap, the 10 kinds of trembling that comprise key terms in the Chihuahua language... and I probably wouldn't have learned much of anything from her if she hadn't demanded that I come to her and understand her perspective and needs and wants first.
That's a smart dog, while I can imagine someone observing such occurence calling the dog dumb.
High stress or emotional arousal or a distracting environment will supersede this but it's a decent starting point which people often miss. Luckily our second dog likes play and praise so that gives us more options.
Dog #2 just doesn't care. She eats the recommended daily amount, but will take hours to finish a meal. Walking away and coming back later. She just doesn't care about food.
I have heard trainers who suggest meal time is meal time, the food is taken if it is not eaten, it's not a self-serve grazing buffet. I think part of it is about making it clear who is in charge, especially if a dog is not listening during training, but there are other reasons I forget like resource guarding and predictable toileting. But we all decide how much we let them express their personalities :)
The former, I'm not sure they'd remember toy names from 10 years ago but I've been impressed time after time after time at her ability to understand the world around her.
THe latter, he's just lucky to remember how to walk down the hall.
Sometimes it is the luck of the draw.
Our high energy, water-loving, labradoodle is only motivated by one thing: frisbee.
Labradoodles are loopy, like most of the bred-for-instagram breeds. Got to expect the abnormal
(Yes I'm annoyed by those who buy a dog to be an accessory and don't bother training them. There are loads of them where I live and they are annoying at best and menaces at worst)
I have two purebred poodles (not bred for Instagram) and one is highly motivated by food, the other will decline treats pretty often, even treats we know he really loves. This is not super atypical of poodles.
And to put another layer of complication on your dismissal of other people's challenges training dogs: the not food-motivated one is way easier to train.
Don’t assume your experience is universal, especially when there’s a lot of people telling you it isn’t.
Eventually I realized she also loves to please - and reason things out herself - and the food was completely unnecessary! No specific "dominance" training necessary.
We have a time frame of roughly 3 hours in which we feed the dog.
That way we can have a nice dinner too, go to a musical etc. pp.
A friend of ours made the same mistake as you. His dog becomes a real diva after 6pm, if she hasn't eaten
So I switched to using a phone alarm that marks when it's time to feed the dogs. I can easily change the time it rings to adjust their meal times, and they remain patient because they know that they won't be fed until they hear that sound.
Out of curiosity we've tried to figure out if there's some external cue he's relying on outside of a very accurate internal 'clock', and haven't found any. He's consistent even in the face of timezone changes and travel across the country (and other mundane tricks that'd eliminate stimulus like daylight cues), different environments / homes (ruling out equipment / building / neighbourhood noises), and different humans (in case his usual companions unwittingly broadcast hints).
I'm forced to the conclusion he swallowed a Rolex at some point.
My own schedule isn't particularly routine otherwise, so it's actually not an unwelcome anchor. He does understand and give up after a couple attempts if you tell him 'later' or have an obvious reason for the delay. He's intent, but not impolite.
We left him with a friend once for a few days who feeds their own dog an hour earlier. The discovery that 5 o'clock dinnertime can be a thing completely rocked his world. He tried to share this revolutionary breakthrough with us but with limited success.
Anyhow, like many of her kind she is NOT into food. That made training her in the beginning very difficult, because we knew no other way back than. Even today, I always have to chuckle when I try to give her a treat and she takes the treat very gently from my hand and puts it down on the floor, like saying "let me put it there for you." Of course, sometimes she just eats it but you never know.
But for the 80% case, yeah, grab some string cheese and a clicker.[0]
In many cases it's the owners fault, not being able to train well
Spend some time training dogs and you'll also find both that food motivation can vary quite a bit (some dogs are more interested in toys than food, for instance) and also that it's quite possible to train dogs without always relying on a food reward.
Generally the deeper you go with understanding and training dog behavior, the more you realize how the same learning theory that informs scientific dog training also describes human behavior. (Imo it also reveals deficiencies in thinking in terms of learning theory/behaviorism alone; idk how you could work closely with animals and seriously believe they lack cognition.)
Of course sharing food is a way to build social bonding and positively motivate social conformance. It is with people too, which is why it's so natural for us to carry it over to our relationship with dogs.
How or why is that depressing?
It's good that we crave what helps us thrive and that we can recognize who makes it easy for us to have more, and there's a beautiful elegance to that fact that so many creatures share the trait, across such diverse lineages as birds, reptiles, fish, arthropods, mammals, etc
Isn't that inspiring, rather than depressing?
Then there are those who just don't care to train their dogs.
There is a worse option.
The thin extending dog lead at maximum extension while walking the dog in twilight on a cycle path. What could go wrong?
Got some doubts about the value of those leads in general; surely it just means the dog has no gauge at all in how far they can go in any direction?
It wasn't a dog, it was a skunk. Fortunately it didn't seem threatened and just waddled away.