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!
Humans and dogs have a successful relationship that goes back thousands of years, and one reason why it works out so well is because we communicate in a way that they understand. Think about what they are saying when they bring you a stick. You know that they want to play fetch, don’t you?
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.
Their eyes will take in light and color differently than we do, and they can see in low light much more easily. Thanks to the muscles on their head, they can rotate their ears to figure out where the sounds are coming from, and let’s not forget that great sense of smell.
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.
First, look at classical conditioning, where a stimulus is associated with a response. We can get over stimulus like going to the doctor or getting in a wreck, but associations like this are much more powerful for a dog and can take a while to train out.
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.
Whenever I am going to go play fetch with my Golden Retrievers, I go out the back door. Whenever I do this, we always play fetch. On the other hand, when I let them out the side door, I never go with them, and I just let them go outside for half an hour or so. Because of this, they know to go to the back when it is time to play games.
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, on the other hand, I still cannot prevent them from eating something off of the floor because they cannot connect the bellyache a few hours later with the food that they ate before. This is just something that takes too much time.
Whether your dog is a Retriever or a Shepherd, a Basset Hound or a Dachshund, you’ll find that you can get him to learn a lot of different things, as long as you know what is possible and what to expect
For instance, consider people on the show circuit who can teach their dogs to go through a complex dance routine, or search and rescue dogs that can pull children from avalanches of snow and flooded rivers. Service dogs can fetch a container of water without spilling a drop, or open a door or pull a wheelchair.
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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