You may call your dog dumb, but how many times have his soulful eyes and beseeching paw made you pass him a treat under the table? The truth is that even dogs who are a little short on brains can be very clever!
One of the reasons why the thousands upon thousands of years of love between people and dogs has lasted so long is because we communicate in a way that they understand. When a dog comes to you with his frisbee and drops it at your feet, you know without being told that he thinks it's time to play fetch.
The two above examples tell us that our dogs can learn very complex behavior and that we can teach them even more.
Remember that just like we do, dog can see and remember a lot of language and posture, but they process it very differently from the way that we do.
Just to start off with, they see in low light much better than we do, their eyes respond to color differently, and they can rotate their ears very quickly, letting them figure out where sounds are coming from. Don't forget that famous nose, either!
These basic differences will tell you a lot about how different their mental functioning is. They understand cause and effect, but it's much different from how we understand it.
Consider classical training, where you learn to associate a stimulus with a response. This is something that humans can ignore pretty easily. For instance, we can shake off an undesired response to a car accident or a visit to a doctor much more easily than a dog can.
Operant conditioning is where we learn about cause and effect through positive and negative reinforcement and is something that is even more different between humans and dogs.
Consider the fact that I always go out the back door with my Golden Retrievers when we are going to play fetch. Whenever we go out that door, we play fetch. On the other hand, when I let them out the side door, I don't go with them; I just leave them for half an hour or so. Of course, they always go to the back door when they want a game or see one coming.
When I train my dogs, I always use a certain tone and a unique hand gesture with every command, and this lets them learn a wide range of behaviors. They will lie down, roll over, release their jaws, come, sit, fetch, drop it and even eliminate on command.
However, consider the fact that telling them not to eat something off the floor that will give them a bellyache is not going to work, no matter how many times they suffer through it. There is just too much of a time lapse that is in place there for them to really figure out what they need to do to stop it from happening.
What you should take from this information is that your dog, whether he is a Shepherd, a Retriever, a Basset Hound or a Dachshund, can learn a lot, if only you remember that he is a dog and not a human!
For instance, look at dogs that can dance on command on the show circuit, or search and rescue dogs that can locate small children and pull them from swollen rivers and bad avalanches. Service dogs can do everything from opening a door to pulling a wheelchair to guiding a blind person.
Remember, though, that they are not people, and that even when they try to act like us and communicate like us, they are still going to do things like eat little dead critters they find in the yard and turn around three times before they sleep!
One of the reasons why the thousands upon thousands of years of love between people and dogs has lasted so long is because we communicate in a way that they understand. When a dog comes to you with his frisbee and drops it at your feet, you know without being told that he thinks it's time to play fetch.
The two above examples tell us that our dogs can learn very complex behavior and that we can teach them even more.
Remember that just like we do, dog can see and remember a lot of language and posture, but they process it very differently from the way that we do.
Just to start off with, they see in low light much better than we do, their eyes respond to color differently, and they can rotate their ears very quickly, letting them figure out where sounds are coming from. Don't forget that famous nose, either!
These basic differences will tell you a lot about how different their mental functioning is. They understand cause and effect, but it's much different from how we understand it.
Consider classical training, where you learn to associate a stimulus with a response. This is something that humans can ignore pretty easily. For instance, we can shake off an undesired response to a car accident or a visit to a doctor much more easily than a dog can.
Operant conditioning is where we learn about cause and effect through positive and negative reinforcement and is something that is even more different between humans and dogs.
Consider the fact that I always go out the back door with my Golden Retrievers when we are going to play fetch. Whenever we go out that door, we play fetch. On the other hand, when I let them out the side door, I don't go with them; I just leave them for half an hour or so. Of course, they always go to the back door when they want a game or see one coming.
When I train my dogs, I always use a certain tone and a unique hand gesture with every command, and this lets them learn a wide range of behaviors. They will lie down, roll over, release their jaws, come, sit, fetch, drop it and even eliminate on command.
However, consider the fact that telling them not to eat something off the floor that will give them a bellyache is not going to work, no matter how many times they suffer through it. There is just too much of a time lapse that is in place there for them to really figure out what they need to do to stop it from happening.
What you should take from this information is that your dog, whether he is a Shepherd, a Retriever, a Basset Hound or a Dachshund, can learn a lot, if only you remember that he is a dog and not a human!
For instance, look at dogs that can dance on command on the show circuit, or search and rescue dogs that can locate small children and pull them from swollen rivers and bad avalanches. Service dogs can do everything from opening a door to pulling a wheelchair to guiding a blind person.
Remember, though, that they are not people, and that even when they try to act like us and communicate like us, they are still going to do things like eat little dead critters they find in the yard and turn around three times before they sleep!
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