Dog Blog

How to Get Your Dog to Stop Laughing and Start Listening

You’ve put it off long enough. It’s time to stop ignoring the fact that your dog sits when he wants, comes to you when he wants, and pretty much goes everywhere he wants. He might also possibly be having other dogs over and drinking your beer while you’re at work.

You need to step up to the plate and train your dog. Ignore his laughter and stand up tall. Give yourself a promotion and become the boss. You have it in you to gain your dog’s respect. You at least have it in your to gain his grudging compliance through negotiation and bribery.

We’ll start with “sit”. This is the command which, upon being successfully taught, is the motivating factor for believing you can get him to do anything else. Start by taking your dog to a quiet place where neither you nor he will be disturbed. Ideally that means a sound-proof room in the middle of the desert since everything distracts your dog, but do the best you can with what you’ve got. (If you actually have a soundproof room in the middle of the desert, don’t tell me about it, because I’m pretty sure you’d have to kill me afterward.)

Put a collar on your dog, but not a leash. Putting a leash on him would make him think that you’re taking him for a walk. Once he finds out you’re not, his mood would not be conducive to successful training.

Start by standing next to your dog and holding on to his collar loosely. Say the word “sit” firmly, and push down on his hips so that he has to sit down. It will be at this point that you will discover how incredibly strong and stubborn a dog can be. Keep at it until he gets it, and when he does get it, act like he just broke one of Michael Phelps’ records.

Next is “stay”. Good luck with this one. Start by having him sit (praising him again for that), and then hold out your palm and firmly say “stay”. Walk about a foot away and wait for one minute. Keep doing this until he gets it, then gradually increase the distance that you go and the time that you wait.

When you move on to the “come” command, you’re likely to get confused. When you were first teaching him how to stay, he kept coming to you when you didn’t want him to. Now that you’re teaching him how to come, he’ll act like he just understood “stay” and wants to practice it. You’re going to have to use a leash with this one, because you’ll need to pull him toward you when you give him the command to come. (Take him for a walk after this so he’ll forgive you.) Have him stand and stay, then walk the length of the leash and say “come” and pull him gently toward you.

Work on “heel” after he’s gotten all the other commands down. It’ll be easier to teach him to heel if he’s really down with “sit”, “stay” and “come”. This will also involve the leash, but you can actually teach this while walking him, so he won’t be so resentful. Simply hold his leash tightly and make him walk beside you after you say “heel” He’ll get the picture fairly quickly, since he’s already an old hand at the other stuff.

You’ll want to walk your dog around the neighborhood and show off how well-trained he is after you’ve taught him everything. Just remember one thing: dogs, like children, suddenly experience long and short-term memory loss when they are asked to show other people what they’ve learned or how cute something is that they do.

As far as the beer and partying with other dogs goes, you might want to set up a kitchen-cam.