Cheap Pet Insurance

May 4th, 2009 by Ryan Rivollier

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.

These are just two examples of the way that your dog tells you what is going on in his mind, and you’ll find that they are not the only way that they engage in complex behavior.

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.

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 use a very specific tone and hand gesture to go along with the command. This gives them all kinds of cues and I can expect them to sit, stay down, no-bite, fetch, release, come and even eliminate at a single 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.

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, one fairly well-known woman has taught her dogs how to dance on command for the show circuit, and rescue dogs can locate children and pull them out of dangerous situations. Service dogs are incredible when they can do things as different as opening a door, pulling a wheelchair or even fetching a container of water without spilling a bit of it.

Dogs are very trainable; just don’t expect them to act like people. Whether we like it or not, they are still dogs and they are still going to do things like sniff other dog’s posteriors!