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Take a Look Inside A Dog's Mind
Socialize your dog by understanding your dog's thoughts
A dog has the basic intelligence of a three-year-old child. Training therefore, is simple: certain sounds or signals his master gives are always followed by certain reactions by the dog. Association based on memory of previous incidents is the dog's main mental equipment. He has no capacity of abstract thought.
Prior to being trained, a dog has no moral judgment and no solid basis for understanding right and wrong. As he matures, he learns appropriate behavior from his animal or human associates.
Dogs are social animals in the wild state, members of a pack. When they are domesticated and accepted as members of a human family, their natural tendency to pack makes them much more open to social pressure. In this dogs differ from cats, whose natural instinct is to hunt and live alone.
The dog's ideas of right and wrong will be based on his personal memories of things he has done and whether they were rewarded or punished. The basis of his learned behavior is memory. He learns by repetition. The competent trainer must take advantage of the dog’s two basic feelings: discomfort and pleasure. The dog soon learns that it is far more comfortable to receive praise than to endure the discomfort of a corrective jerk on the choke collar or the harshness of the command "no" because of his capacity to remember and his social natures you will find that the unhappiness he feels with lack of praise will often be enough to ensure his cooperation.
The dog's mental qualities also include jealousy, possessiveness, curiosity and the desire to please by conforming exactly to his master's wishes. Most information can be gained about a dog through observation. The dog uses his eyes very little compared to his ears and nose. He will therefore be very sensitive to the tone of his master's voice when a command is given Some dogs are so sensitive to the overtone of impatience given with a command that their masters have found it necessary to communicate through whistles or gestures rather than voice. The trainer should be careful to not allow this problem to arise in the first place by being very patient with the dog.
The dog's nose is perhaps the most important of his senses. The dog's sense of smell is so strong that, after advanced training, he will be aware of human emotional states - fear, anxiety, and hostility -that are hidden to his master. This ability to differentiate between the various emotional states of the human being is an obvious advantage within the realm of police work.
As with the human race there are various types of personalities among dogs. The following are some of the more obvious types of personalities which may be encountered when working with dogs.
- Moody Dog: If the dog is selfish, stubborn, fearful ill- tempered or indifferent to what is going on around him, there is usually a cause. Find it and remove it.
- Sensitive Dog: This dog will respond best to reward, pleasure and praise.
- Stubborn Dog: This dog tries to take advantage of his master. Give him time to obey the commands and make it as easy as possible for him to obey. Reward him by praising extravagantly when he does. Do not over-punish him. When you do punish, do so firmly, clearly and quickly.
- Sulky Dog: Do not coddle him. His sensibilities are easily offended. The trainer should time the rewards and praises for moments when he is not in a sulky mood. Sulkiness and stubbornness are similar.
- Spoiled Dog: Humor him at first but as little as possible. Gradually increase the standard of discipline you expect. A dog can be spoiled in a few weeks it may then take months to cure him. Do not let him have his own way at any time unless it is as a reward for good performance.
- Nervous Dog: This dog requires constant attention, supervision and firm kindness until he learns to trust you and becomes confident that you will not expose him to things he fears. Nervousness can be due to poor mentality or to bad training methods.
- Actor Dog: Usually his dog is an overgrown puppy that has not got past the mischievous stage. Do not punish him severely. Firmness and common sense will direct his cleverness and vitality into the right channels instead of dampening his spirit.
- Perfect Dog: You are indeed fortunate. We have never met one.
In general, a dog that shows a lot of life and barks readily is likely to be the best pupil for training. A quiet, sulking dog usually learns slowly and may rebel. A bubbly dog, one with a quick ear and alert eyes accepts suggestions quickly and performs soundly once trained.
The trainer must study the dog and know his individual reactions to various circumstances. There is no hard and fast rule that every dog must follow and only the trainer-master will know when the dog is not living up to his potential.
Socializing Your Dog
Socialization put simply, means keeping your dog with you as much as you can. It is important to keep up a friendly relationship with the dog and make him a member of your family.
For ease of socialization, you should try to find a puppy not less than eight or more than twelve weeks old. The puppy should come from a home where there is warm association between the owners and the puppies they raise.
A newborn puppy is blind, deaf and, like a baby, completely dependent on its mother. At approximately five weeks of age, the pup enters a crucial stage. Association with people in general and with a family or one particular person will affect his character and learning behavior forever after.
This is called early human/canine socialization and the importance of this stage cannot be emphasized enough. It has been proven in several experiments. In one of these, litters of puppies and their mothers were isolated in large fields, where they had no contact with humans. Their food was put into the field through a trap door in the barrier that acted as a boundary. At various ages from two to fifteen weeks, puppies were brought out and tested for their ability to socialize with humans. The results of these tests demonstrated that the period from three to seven weeks is the critical time for puppies to come into contact with humans. Puppies that were left wild, without human contact for fifteen weeks, were almost un-trainable.
In other experiments, puppies were left isolated in pens two feet square until they were sixteen weeks old. These pups tended to crouch timidly in a corner and often were fear biters when brought out.
To test their reaction to the opposite situation, puppies have been taken away from their litter mates at a very early age and raised with only human associates. When they were later allowed to associate with other dogs, they did not respond normally and preferred human company.
These tests were conducted in order to determine the limits of the critical period for human/canine socialization and are admittedly exceptional situations. Most puppies will have had some human contact during the critical stage but in some commercial breeding kennels there may not have been enough.
In order for a dog to become socialized he must begin life by being a puppy with other puppies. Then at about five or six weeks of age and definitely no later than twelve weeks of age, he should have a period of close association with people.
If the puppy is removed from the litter prior to seven weeks he has not received enough socialization from his litter mates. As a grown dog he will tend to pick fights with other dogs. He will not have had enough discipline from his mother and will be over-aggressive in other ways when he is grown. These things will naturally affect his ability to accept training.
If he has had a normal association with his litter mates up to seven weeks of age and some handling by humans, he will be ideally suited to moving into your home, where he should be fully integrated into human society.
Some preliminary training should begin between seven and twelve weeks of age and the dog should be given much affection. This gives the puppy a feeling of importance; of being an individual.
There will be innumerable difficulties with a grown dog whose socialization has been delayed or entirely omitted. In extensive testing and experimenting, the trainers of the Guide Dogs of America organization discovered that early socialization is vitally important in the development of young dogs. Without it, Guide Dogs of America had a 92% failure rate when they first started. With early socialization the failure rate dropped to a mere 8%. In their experiments to provide human/canine association they used teenage boys and girls as companions for the dogs. This association was ideal because the dogs were also young when accepted for training and could be classed as teenagers themselves.
During early socialization, strong bonds of trust and appreciation are formed as a foundation for the more complicated tasks the dog has to learn later. This bond is just as important as the basic training the teenagers give the future guide dogs-because it directly governs the type of personality the dog will develop later.
The old saying that a dog takes after its master is perfectly true. Displays of bad temper, meanness, cruelty and other forms of bad character must never be presented to the dog. His ability to imitate and develop these characteristics is frightening.
The creation of a really effective police canine unit depends on just the kind of early socialization described. The selection of suitably well-balanced police dog handlers is the next most important requirement.
A new dog handler cannot be taught the personality of his canine partner. He can be shown how to encourage a personality to develop but he must learn to understand the dog's personality himself. It often takes a full year of working with the dog before he really understands his character and it usually takes about the same length of time for the dog to understand his master.
What are especially striking are the wide differences in the characters and aptitudes of different police dogs. This is despite the care taken to select dogs that seem to be suited to the special requirements of police work. These differences are due in part to the particular qualities of each dog's handler.
Once mutual understanding is achieved, seasoned police dogs and dog handlers become so attuned to each other that the dog may act correctly in an emergency before the master gives him any direction. He actually thinks and reacts to situations the same way the dog handler does.
More than 90% of the incidents involving use of a police dog are searches for hidden objects or persons. When the police dog is required to be aggressive, his aggression is always strictly controlled. It this was not possible, then the dog would not be able to accompany the handler everywhere he goes. A properly trained dog can be taken off the leash into business premises, schools, playgrounds, even into a church, with perfect confidence in the safety of everyone.
Police dog handlers have families and homes and that the dog should become a part of the family spending time playing and watching television etc. He must learn to act like a member of the family and be accepted as such. He should be expected to act as other family members and display proper manners.
It is not merely desirable but absolutely essential to have police dogs socialized in this way. The essential point in a dog's socialization is that he must never be running out of control. It is not desirable to allow dogs to roam at will and join others to form a pack. Dogs in packs lose their fear of humans and of children particularly. They revert to canine-to-canine socialization.
The process of socialization depends upon two things: Tender Loving Care and Training. TLC means proper feeding and grooming, plus that something extra - love. Training begins at a very elementary level. It goes on indefinitely, to whatever level you aim to reach.
Whatever the level of training, it will be most effective only if a good human/canine association is developed between dog and master.