Be Insane

Hands up if you love my catchy titles? They're pretty good eh? Thank you. Anyways to business. What is kind of a slippery slope is treating highly intelligent animals like people. Now there are merits to treating your dogs that way; totally. Like treating them with trust and respect. Fostering growth by means of patience and support. Those things help dogs immensely. However, there are areas that it is simply foolish. For one thing they do not understand grudges. If you get upset with your dog about something and correct it, don't then take it out on every other aspect of training. Which brings me to the title. "Be Insane" should be a personal mantra. What I mean by it specifically is to be very quick to anger and even quicker to forgiveness. Go crazy over little things but act like it never happened as soon as you got your point across. Basically behaviour that would make the average person worry about you. With that said you can't be cruel. Cruelty as defined by being harsh on your dog for what they don't understand. I fully endorse being short tempered but only for when they are willfully being bad. You can't yell at a puppy for not taking a flank and you can't yell at a mature dog for not lying down in front of a charging cow. Using the same logic, you can't be harsh past correcting them for their behaviour. They don't understand that beyond believing that you hate them. Not to mention that if you go into situations acting as though they will do it poorly, you'll always be right. Where as if you believe it will go well then you may be wrong but eventually you'll be right. Always ask only what they are ready/capable to do and forget any past mistakes. That's how you develop trust and respect and build obedience off of trust and respect.