Advice: put your shoes where the dog can't reach them.
Seriously, two good books to try are "Culture Clash" by Jean Donaldson - good insight into dog behavior and, for lack of a better word, psychology; and "Clicker Training With Your Dog" - can't remember the author but they have it at Petsmart. It's based a lot on basic learning theory and behaviorism. We have a very willful and unmotivated chow mix and she's been fairly easy to train with what we learned in these books.
I have to say, though, that you need to forget about this "for spite" stuff. The dog chewed the shoes because she was bored and anxious. Dogs don't have the same motivations people do - they basically understand fear, prey instinct, boredom, and hunger. They're not vindictive (she didn't chew your shoes because you ran her out of the kitchen - she just chewed your shoes and you supplied the reasoning after the fact). And she doesn't know what she's doing is wrong - dogs don't get "wrong" - she only knows that you yell when she does X, where X seems perfectly reasonable behavior to her. Sounds like she needs some chew toys - basted rawhide is good - and some basic confidence training. Provide more attractive chewing objects for her and she's likely to leave your shoes alone; get her to be more comfortable with separation and she'll quit being anxious when left alone.
Don't forget that the most important part of training a dog is training the dog's owner(s) how to think like a dog. Yelling over bad behavior rarely discourages the bad behavior - it just makes the dog afraid of you. Also, a 1.5 year old dog is still technically an "adolescent" dog - she's going to have a few behavior issues that are likely to dissipate with age. Reward good behavior - give her the rawhide chews and when she pays any attention to them at all, give her treats and praise her lavishly. The clicker training book has really good tips for how to encourage good behaviors and how to "extinct" bad behaviors. Good luck!
__________________
"If ten million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing."
- Anatole France
|