This page is part of the Auxiliary Section of the Beginners Course of the
D.S. Dog Training Workshop - an element of the Dog Science Network
Why It Is Easier to Train A Happy Dog
In the first few pages of the workshop devoted to the basics of dog training, I was talking about how you can control your dog's behavior by controlling his emotions. If you read my opening remarks in that space, it may have sounded like, while being trained, your dog would be in some neutral state of mind, emotionally speaking, and then, you would cause him to either feel pleased or you would cause him to feel emotionally upset, depending on how he behaved. But that was the simplified version. That's not really exactly how it works.
True enough, one of your goals in managing your dog's emotions should be to cause him to feel bad when he is bad, and you most certainly want him to feel good when he is good. However, with a happy dog, there is no need to make him happy in exchange for his doing something that you want him to do, because he will already be happy at the time he does it, whatever it may be.
Just the fact that your dog feels good at the time he engages in a desirable response means that he will enjoy making that response, which will increase the chances that he will want to make that response again, and thereby fall into a habitual pattern of behaving well.
For example, imagine that you are out for a walk with your off-lead dog when a cat walks by. The dog, however, does not chase the cat. Rather, he watches it with mild interest and allows the feline to go its way unmolested. If the dog felt good as the cat strolled by unassailed, and simply ignoring the cat worked out well for him, then he is likely to fall into the habit of not chasing cats.
To be sure, you should frequently reward your dog when he does something right, even if the something right he did consists merely of passing up the opportunity to do something wrong. However, if your dog already feels good at the time of the incident, then any additional rewards you offer will just be icing on the cake. Although, to be sure, icing on the cake is good. Dogs will most certainly work for icing. But for a dog that already felt pretty damn good to begin with, who enjoyed behaving well in any case, a little extra praise, as desirable as that is, is just the cherry on top of an already tasty experience.
The point is that if your dog feels happy pretty much all the time, then, he is going to already be happy at the moment that he engages in the desirable responses that you are trying to teach him. That means that if you have a chronically joyful dog who already feels good when he is doing good things, then, other than continuing to keep making your dog happy, all you have to do from there is to see to it that he feels unhappy every time he does something that he should not do. So having a perpetually happy dog puts you half way there before you even get started.
If I told you that you would have to find a way to make a human being feel perpetually happy, that would be a tall order, because it is extremely unlikely that you could ever hope to control the circumstances of a person's life well enough for you to be able to absolutely guarantee their happiness. However, you do control every aspect of your dog's life, which means that you should be able to control his physical and social environments well enough to ensure the ratio of response to reinforcement that is necessary to infuse the animal with joy.
Because we humans are social animals, we have a very strong tendency to absorb the mood of those around us. You know yourself how upsetting it is to be around someone who is distraught, how difficult it is to be with someone who is angry, and how stressful it can be to spend time with someone who is obsessed with any emotionally taxing issue.
Because, as humans, we tend to absorb the mood of those around us, we all prefer to be with creatures that are happy and upbeat. That is why it is that, over the millennia, as people decided which of their dogs to breed for propagation purposes, they by and large choose happy, fun-to-be-around animals. As a result, the canine species has been genetically engineered for thousands of years to create a modern strain of dog that is, by his very nature, predisposed to bubble-over with joy.
Granted, one does encounter many dogs who are in a state of chronic distress, but that is because those animals are either in poor health, or because they are being kept in miserable surroundings where there is little or no opportunity for them to engage in rewarding activities. However, with the exception of animals that were thwarted developmentally, if you provide any given dog with half a shot at getting his needs met, you are likely to find that you have one elated critter on your hands. That's because our species bred their species to be happy, because being with happy dogs helps us to be happy too.
Therefore, if you have the time and the resources necessary to see to it that your dog's needs are well met, he will be happy, and his joyful condition will make it that much easier for you to train him.
For one thing, happy dogs are much more active than sad dogs. That is not surprising, since in both dogs and humans, activity level has been shown to increase dramatically when reinforcement levels are high.
The fact that happy dogs are more active means that they will make more responses. In other words, they will do more things. The fact that your dog does more means that he will do more things right. That in turn, will allow you to reinforce more, and the dense ratio of reinforcement you have in place will produce more joyful behavior which will, in turn, tend to jack-up your dog's activity level still more. That will give you more opportunities to teach your dog what is and is not acceptable, which will allow you to get him trained that much sooner.
Also, happy dogs are always much more enthusiastic about being trained than their unhappy counterparts, which should make the experience that much more pleasant for you.
Another reason it is easier to get results with a joyful canine is the fact that happy dogs take punishment procedures much more to heart. It is just a fact that the better the mood a dog is in before he is punished, the more effective the punishment will be in suppressing the punished behavior. In other words, the happier your dog is at the time you punish him, the more likely it is that the punishment will have the desire effect, providing that the punishment is also delivered immediately.