July 30th, 2008
Dog Training and Children
I purchased a small dog in February 2008. Before I purchased this dog (at the request of my children), I told them that the dog would require training and would be their responsibility. Once we got the dog and his final vaccinations, I signed up for the dog training class. I asked the trainer to do each exercise and monitoring with my boys because it was their dog. Well I found out something about my boys and dogs. The dog would perform well while in class and not good at home. I’d watch the boys while they went through the dog training program each evening. Later, I found out that while the boys would follow the trainers’ instructions in class, they decided that the dog didn’t like learning by being ignored when he wasn’t compliant. They also would confine the dog buy shutting him in the bathroom. Then, they thought that making the dog eat something he wouldn’t like when he did the wrong thing would make him do the right thing (since it had worked with them). Well it turns out that the dog actually likes tomatoes, cucumbers and radishes and would keep doing the wrong thing in order to get what was to him a treat.
