vpeewee

I have a question that has been bugging me for a while, when does bad behaviour become good behaviour and how long does the dog need to recognise this? Let me explain, when training our dog we have mostly been told to ignore 'bad behaviour', ie. barking, jumping etc and then reward the good behaviour. But how long does it take for the dog to recognise from bad to good behaviour? For example, our dog barks when we go to the backdoor beucase he wants us to come outside (and he jumps on you when you open the door) so i stand at the door and wait until he sits (beucase he knows thats what he has to do), but how long does he have to hold the sit for before I open the door as the reward? Is waiting 2 seconds ok, 5 seconds? 10 second? Another example, when he jumps on me I turn my back and ignore him, sometimes he jumps a bit more but then eventually he will sit down, how long should I wait before I turn around and give him attention? I guess this goes with a lot of other training, so how long does a dog need to realise that he is being good? Does it depend on the breed or individual dogs? What are your thoughts on this?

Ok, have tried out my computer skills and here goes, hopefully below you will see some piccies of my beautiful boy. One is of him just after he was clipped and the other two are a bit later, we let him get pretty shaggy over winter!

yeah I thought he was tired too but he still had enough energy to jump up and attempt to lick my nose off! I have tried to post pictures beofre but I couldn't get it to work. Do you know of a post that explains how to do it in very simple terms??

Hi All, We took our 10 month old Giant Schnauzer to his first obeidence training last night and it went really well. He has never been to nay kind of formal training before and wasn't very socialised so even though weh ad tought him the basics (sit, drop etc) I was a bit worried about how he would go. He was excellent! With so many dogs around I was really happy with how he went, he still listened to me and did the 'sits' and 'drops' perfectly. He met a couple of other dogs (got a bit excited then) and he was the most 'vocal' in the class but even when he was barking he was just lying on the ground so it wasn't threatening or anything. Just had to share how happy I was (and proud of him ) Although, we have found out that we have a lazy dog. Every time we stopped he just wanted to lie down. Sometimes I would tell him to sit and he would but then slide down into the laying position. I wasn't reallly that worried though, he is a big dog and if he wants to lay down its fine with me! Can't wait to go back next week and meet some new friends!

Hhhhmmmm, doesn't really seem like there are many other ideas. I will try the balloon trick, but I would also be worried about him eating the balloons.... I have washing hung all over the house at the moment, but there are only so many times I can wash my sheets and hang them over the dining chairs in the kitchen, it doesn't leave much room left! I will battle on, maybe if I start with some old clothes that I don't mind losing..... Cheers for the help.

My 8 month old Giant Schnauzer has in the last two weeks just discovered that he can pull washing off the line. Now, nothing stays on! I have tried to catch him in the act, once I did but since then he does not go near it when we arn't home. If we go out and leave washing on the line, its all on the ground by the time we get back. He doesn't rip them up or anything, just pulls them off and sits on them. I have searched for other topics and tried the chillies in stockings trick, but he just pulled them off and ate all the chillies! He didn't seem to mind them either. Are there any other suggestions to save my clothes?