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Originally Posted by guccilvr
so holdup, you called bullshit on me when I was telling someone to watch their tone and you said they understand tone?  If I say everything in a harsh tone the dog won't know what to do. But if I use NO in a harsh tone and sit in a calm tone. They will understand that sit is good and No is bad.
Dogs understand meaning just fine. In fact, iirc, Dogs can understand some 300 words that a human uses. If they didn't then they wouldn't understand voice commands. I say sit and the dog sits. Oh and I don't give treats for training. I know several trainers who will agree that you shouldn't use a harsh tone when you are giving a command to a dog. That being said, everyone has their own way of training. |
I'm sorry, I must've misunderstood you. I read you as saying that a harsh tone should never be used, even when correcting bad behaviour. Of course one shouldn't use a harsh tone in training, that would be
very counter-productive.
I don't remember ever mentioning the use of treats. I prefer to steer away from that too, because if you train the dog with treats the dog will expect a treat every time he does what he's told. Verbal praise and attention is a much better tool.
I'll amend the language thing, since people want to be picky about it. Dogs can learn to understand certain words, since they're highly associative learners. They can learn, for example, to associate the word 'pizza' with someone coming over, or they can learn to associate a command with an action. Whether they understand the inherent meaning of the word is debatable and not really relevant. Nonetheless, a seven week old puppy is one who's probably only just learned that there are certain places that he shouldn't go to the bathroom and will not understand any words you speak to him.
The main thing to remember when training a dog is that a dog is not a person. People have a habit of anthropizing their pets, which is detrimental to the training process since it causes them to expect their pets to react in a human fashion. Therefore, when I discuss training I tend to use phrasing that discourages the practice. Your dog is not a person and you will both be happier as soon as you understand that.