Conflicting puppy raising philosophies

Cancel the dog trainer you really dont need one.
Just book OH in for deep ear cleaning so that he can actually hear what youre saying and then with a counsellor because he obviously has issues. Do you have any idea why he wont listen ?
My own dear OH is a nightmare when it comes to training he still does the 'murphy, Murphy, MURPHY'! thing instead of using any commands but to give him respect he does have a medical excuse for his bloody mindedness..

try cleaning away your shoes and leaving his best ones out for the dog, leave his dinner unattended and make sure the dog eats his steak, let the dog chew wood but make sure the splinters are where he walks barefoot.. Maybe training him will be easier if he feels the consequences.

 

I look at it this way, both parties have to be reading off of the same page. Be it be a dog or a child,send out mixed messages...you'll get mixed up behaviour.

 

I kinda get both sides.. I agree we need training, absolutely, but then imo, there is the element of over control and over thinking that seems to happen these days, but in your case if you are trying to instill one kind of behavior and your husband is allowing another then that probably isn't going to work out well, maybe find a happy medium if possible that will be good for your pup?

 

Shanti - I'm with you on this one because the issue here isn't just that your husband believes one thing and you believe another. Whatever it is he believes is the right method for raising the dog, he's not consistent with it anyway! Even if he had a leg to stand on, he doesn't seem to be doing anything but confusing matters by half-committing and half-not, whilst you're at least trying to get some cohesion on that matter, and you're even coming on here asking other people to try and help, which is commendable.

With my pup I'm learning that, no, you can't control everything your dog does. But trying, as you're doing, is better than nothing. A lot better, because surely a dog that grows up knowing it can get away with anything is worse than one who is aware there might be consequences to its actions.

If your husband agreed with you that your dog shouldn't go on the sofa (as it seems he did at first) then he should stick to the training plan for that particular thing. It seems unfair for him to engage in the training and then randomly decide to let her on the sofa for a whole day.

Perhaps it would be a good idea to make a list of the few things (if there are any) that you and your husband do agree on e.g. that your dog running after joggers is a bad thing which needs to be corrected. Then, if he agrees with you that it is a bad thing, it is down in writing and you can agree what the course of action for that particular thing is and he has to stick with it. And if he goes back on it, well that just shows how exasperating he's being.

(Sorry, I have way less patience for partners than I do for dogs....)

 

Your puppy sounds really normal and full of beans: three very active and clever breeds in the mix.Our latest boy (THE WORKING SPANIEL FROM HELL!- official kennel name) has been all of this and more. We ignored bad behaviour (picked shoes if chewed, picked feet up when they were chewed etc) and rewarded good: being calm, sitting, taking things gently, coming back. Often he did none of these things. (Oh and put plasters on nip sites. My fingers were too sore to type one awful week- and I write for a living.) He's now two. He's calmed down, grown up and is lovely. Yes of course he grabbed my hair when I bent down to tie my laces today. He's a dog not a robot. I laughed. Try to be less anxious around him, don't argue too much over him and enjoy him while he's a puppy. I dread my boy getting middle-aged and stodgy. Oh and exercise is really king- Dr Walk cures a lot of ills. Best of luck. We've just done a stretch of the Thames Path with ours- every night in a strange cottage sleeping like a baby. Him not us.

 

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I can only heartily concur with @JudyN -
dominance in relation to humans is a complete myth; just as the “Alpha wolf” fantasy was, both were based on early studies of captive wolves, who lived in randomly-assembled “packs”.

A wild wolf-pack is a family, nothing more & certainly nothing less; young wolves who have graduated from several years of rearing their younger siblings & hunting under the tutelage of their parents, go walkabout & meet one another.
Either of the 2 can decide this is not the mate for them, & keep looking - or they meet, court, & decide they will pair up. This isn’t a light decision; the bitch will be totally dependent on his hunting skills to keep her alive, late in pregnancy, when the only thing she can catch is rodents; the male will depend on her as a hunting partner to bring down big game, as a partner in defending their territory from other wolves as well as coyotes, & to devotedly rear their children.
He will feed her when she is heavy in pup, or while their pups are neonates who consume her total attn; she will only leave them in those early days, alone in the den the parents dug together, to get herself a drink of water, or to void. Only after they are able to control their own core temps will she leave them for more than a few minutes at a time.

If either of them is sick or injured, their mate will hunt, & bring them food; there are documented instances of wolves keeping a trapped adult fed for weeks, while they were helpless in a trap (typically a leghold steel trap, or sometimes fallen into a pit trap).

Their first litter of pups will stay on to help rear the next, & help hunt to feed them; juveniles usually stay for 2 years with mom & dad before they leave to find a mate, & some will stay for 3 years, playing auntie or uncle to their younger sibs, patrolling the home territory, watching for intruders, babysitting for hours or days while their parents hunt widely.
Most packs are 3 generations of the same family, sometimes 4: a widowed great-grandparent may stay on after losing their mate, & be a nearly full-time babysitter once the most recent pups are about 3 to 4-WO, freeing their granddottir to help hunt, & to be another belly carrying meat back from the kill, to feed the pups and any stay-at-home members of the family.

Usually it’s the parents, who are the sole breeding pair, plus this year’s pups, plus the yearlings, the 2-YO pups, & maybe a couple of 3-YOs who haven’t decided to go off on their own, yet.

It’s also possible for a young wolf who has just left their natal family to meet & pair with a widowed adult, whose mate died - shot, poisoned, injured irreparably in a hunt or while fighting with an intruding pack, traumatically injured by sheer accident, killed by an infection or a contagion... the new pair may join up with the widowed partner’s surviving pups, or strike out on their own & find a new territory to rear their own future litters.

DOMINANCE has a very specific definition in animal behavior, & the very 1st defining criterion is that it occurs only between 2 individuals, it is not an attitude or a personality trait; 2nd, it is an EVENT, which only becomes a pattern (dominant individual, subordinate individual) if it happens consistently over many events between the same 2 animals; 3rd, it is an is intraspecies, not INTERspecies event (dog to dog, horse to horse, etc, not horse re dog, not dog re cat, & not nonhuman to human, either), & last but critically, dominance is about resources: who gets what, & resources are inherently limited.

Individuals will fight over food, a treasured object (a toy, a bone, ...), for the chance to mate, & so on; they may fight over a high-value territory with lots of cover, food, & nearby water, as male robins do, in spring.
THEY ARE NOT FIGHTING “FOR STATUS” - dominance displays which are mostly gestures & postures (as seen in dogs, owned or feral) & dominance displays that may become violent physical aggro, as seen in many wild species, are not about “bragging rights”; they are about preferred access to scarce resources.
The bull elk who wins a fight with another bull will mate with many more cows; the cows will prefer him to an untested youngster or a loser. The prairie grouse cock who displays on the lek with the loudest boom & most-vigorous dance will be chosen by more hens.

We humans are not contending with our dogs for their food, nor do we fight with our dogs over which of us will mate with another dog - at least, normal humans are not mating with dogs & creating dog / human hybrids.

We humans control every resource in our dogs’ lives; they are automatically dependent upon us, & cannot be “dominant” to us, by definition. It’s a complete misuse of the term.

Moreover, dominance is not a character trait; NO DOG can be “a dominant dog”, as that implies that this individual is bizarrely ‘dominant’ to every living dog on Earth, a patently ridiculous idea.
Dominance describes the outcome of an event; it is not an adjective describing a dog, except in relation to another particular dog, & over one specific instance, when those 2 dogs contended for a resource, & one lost. :shrug:

Deference happens many, many times more often in dogs than dominance ever does -- but deferring nonviolently is not sexy, exciting, or as irresistibly romantic as the fantasy of “the wolf on the hearth rug”.
Every time a dog comes out of the water with the toy s/he just fetched, & another dog who was racing to get that toy drops back & watches, that’s classic deference. Every time a dog glances at another dog who is eating, or gnawing a bone, & gets a brief hard-eyed glare in response, & that dog then looks away, indicating s/he is relinquishing any interest, that is deference in action.

Trainers who talk about “dominant dogs” or dogs dominating owners, or who preach using “dominance” to train one’s dog, are sadly ignorant of dog social behaviors, as well as ignorant of training itself.

- terry

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This 'bring on dysplasia' belief is a bit of a myth and has very little hard science behind it. There was a study done in the US a while back which seemed to suggest a puppy allowed free play with litter mates and more activity generally (because it had been kept by its breeder and was with other dogs all day) grew more slowly than a domestically homed dog that had restrictive exercise but had healthier hips at adulthood. Obviously no dog of any age should be walked to exhaustion. But if a puppy has the energy to be attacking a sofa, it has the energy to have its lead on and walk around the block! And so much nocer for it than being put in a cage, say. There's no published evidence that early exercise can bring on arthritic conditions- though shock and injury to joints such as a fall onto a hard surface may do this.

 

the whole 5 minute walk rule comes from this study. slightly less an all encompassing thing than you might imagine from internet scare stories.
Housing- and exercise-related risk factors associated with the development of hip dysplasia as determined by radiographic evaluation in a prospecti... - PubMed - NCBI

 

Yeah- there's that and one other I've seen- both pretty much the same results. And of course it's common sense. Puppies were born to be active and not born climb stairs!

 

I would consider it rude if someone started petting me and hugging me while i was eating so i dont do it to bax, that being said if he DOES have something he CANNOT have *cough* socks *cough* then i play the trading game.

I honestly don't know if he's still super guardy or not cause i always just trade or let him keep it.