The clacking and movement of the printer drives one of my dogs to be crazy. She attacks the printer and has broken one already. We are teaching her to be ignore the printer, but she’s not there yet. So we manage her when we are printing and we don’t have the time or patience to teach in that moment.
Printing is a pretty easy thing to manage. Seldom do you have ”surprise” printing or “unplanned” printing. Things like delivery people, the neighbor’s dog or people walking up and down your street are much harder and are seldom ”planned”.
I always recommend that you learn the basics of how to teach calm behavior around not calm things on those things you can plan, control and schedule. Brooms, vacuums, printers, etc. These are all things you can control when they are brought out to interact with and you can control the interaction.
The basic mechanics are this:
- Put your dog on a leash. If you can’t physically limit the dog, you can’t teach them.
- Figure out what about the object turns your beloved pet from calm to chaos. I’m going to wager it’s movement and sound, but every dog is different, so figure it out for your dog.
- Start with the object not moving and not making sound. If your dog’s issue is just seeing the object, then see below. Reward your dog for being calm and attentive to you in the presence of the object.
- If the mere sight of the object is your dog’s challenge, then distance is your friend. Figure out how far from the object you have to be to get them to be calm and pay attention to you. Once you get calm and attentive behavior, reward.
- Rewarding does not immediately mean food. Food can work as a reward, but so can our attention, a favorite toy, tug, fetch, etc. What is important here is that the dog finds whatever you give them to be rewarding. We don’t define rewarding. The dog defines what is rewarding. If you’re not having success teaching your dog, either your rewards are low value and/or your delivery of rewards is inconsistent and poorly timed.
- Now that you have your starting point, build until you can do whatever you want with the object and the dog could care less. The break down of that might look something like this:
- Put your hand on the object. If that doesn’t cause the dog to react, reward and then move it slightly. Reward anytime the dog is calm and attentive. If the dog goes crazy, take a step back. Try to reward BEFORE the dog reacts.
- Once you can touch the object and move it a little bit, make noise with the object. Again, small increments here. Literally on and off if the object has a switch or moving it against a surface to make noise. Again, get that reward in BEFORE the dog reacts. If you’ve pushed the dog to react, take a step back and reinforce whatever you were doing before. Making the setup harder for the dog, without frequent reward will set them up to fail and you to be frustrated.
- Keep increasing difficulty until you can do whatever you want with the object. Then move the training to a new room and start over. Dogs don’t generalize well and may or may not behave the same way in the next room. Once you’ve trained in several rooms, test your dog to see if they can generalize by going to a new space and testing them. If they fail, train them there too and test again in a new space.
- Set your dog up to succeed. Train in small increments of time – 5 minutes or less per session.
When you aren’t teaching, manage. If you need to use the object (i.e. sweep or vacuum or print), put your dog away so they can’t practice reacting to the object.
Once you have success with scenarios you can time and control, start working on those you can’t. You have to first work on your awareness of the world. You need to be watching out the window, listening for the delivery truck, observing your dog’s increased arousal as they can hear/perceive all of that before you. Become aware and it will go far in your ability to change your dog’s behavior. You have to capture opportunities to teach in these scenarios and you have to capture the success BEFORE they fail. You also have a management plan for when you can’t teach.
My dogs have learned that when the neighbor dog barks, they might get a reward. It often gives me that moment to intercede and reward them for looking to and listening to me and not run out the door and bark at the neighbor’s dog. I’ve also learned to listen for my neighbor’s door or their truck to start that usually gives a clue that their dog is about to be out and barking at the fence. When I know I can’t be attentive to what’s going on outside, I manage the behavior by limiting the dogs’ access to that physical space.
The key here is to look at whatever challenge you have differently. Break it down and look for opportunities and ways to teach your dogs the behaviors you would prefer. It isn’t going to be easy, but it can be fun if that’s the way you choose to approach it. I find teaching much more rewarding and fun than constant management of behaviors. Management is tiring and stressful and not fun to me. But management is the stop gap until you can teach.