What is Real Behavior Change?

If you’ve ever had a problem with your dog and looked for help, you know there are a lot of different schools of thought on how to “fix” your dog’s problem behaviors. For example, say your dog barks at the mailman. Many people will assume that this is their dog trying to assert their dominance over the mailman to show them who’s boss. This is actually not the case. “Dominance theory” has, in fact, been disproved over and over again (https://www.whole-dog-journal.com/behavior/debunking-the-alpha-dog-theory/).

Instead, in order to figure out exactly what is going on, you need to break down the behavior into it's constituent elements, or the ABCs (the antecedent, the behavior, and the consequence).

Take a common example that most of us are familiar with…. barking at the mailman. The antecedent is the “sight of the mailman” (who is clearly up to no good!). The behavior is the dog barks, and the consequence is that the mailman goes away. Whether or not the mailman was going to leave anyway has no bearing on the situation. Your dog believes it’s his barking that resulted in the departure of the murderous mailman.

Now, there are a number of different ways you could get your dog to stop barking at the mailman. One popular way to stop the barking is to squirt your dog with water each time he barks. Seems innocuous enough right? It might even stop the behavior in the short term.

But what’s really going on here? You always need to take a step back and ask “what is my dog really learning here?”

Let’s assume that your dog already doesn’t like the mailman approaching your house. When you squirt him with water, all your dog knows is that when the mailman approaches something else even worse happens! This will not likely make your dog feel better about the presence of the mailman. Instead, it will likely make him feel worse. This is called “Classical Conditioning.”

In this way, your dog is unconsciously learning that the already bad mailman is even worse than he imagined because the mailman is now paired with a squirt of water.

This is the problem with trying to fix the behavior by suppressing it. You’re not addressing the underlying problems causing the behavior, which can lead to even bigger problems down the line.

For example, say your dog is enjoying sitting out in the front yard on a summer day. Then, all of a sudden… who should appear but the dreaded mailman! Suddenly, your dog’s memories of all the times he was squirted comes quickly flooding back to him. Your dog quickly looks around…no squirt bottle in sight to stop him.

You can guess how this story ends.

This is why it’s important to address the underlying reason as to why your dog is doing what he’s doing. Does he lunge at bark at other dogs on the street? Does your dog nip at you when you come near his bone? Does your dog bark incessantly when you leave the house?

Don’t just suppress your dog’s unwanted behaviors. Work to address them by fixing the underlying cause of the behaviors so that you and your dog can have an improved quality of life.