Anyone who has been a client of mine knows that I’m big on information gathering. Before I even meet with a potential client, there is a ten-page sheet that must be filled out that asks all kinds of questions ranging from a dog’s bite history to what their favorite snack is. These questions aren’t arbitrary; they provide a lot of information and reveal patterns of thought that are obvious to professionals with a trained eye.
I encourage owners to explain in detail what they want their dog to do by the end of training, and it’s this question in particular where I see similar answers. There are, of course, what one would consider the “basic” answers (“I want my dog to come when called”, or “I want my dog to stop jumping on people”), but I always find myself shocked by the number of people who say they want their dog to learn “no”.
This has always stumped me, even before I began to train dogs professionally. 'No’, in its most basic sense, is a word that negates something and has a general negative connotation. ‘No’ has a variety of uses and definitions that differ based on who you’re talking to.
‘No’ is the most common cue used by owners aside from ‘sit’ and ‘come’. People tell their dogs ‘no’ when they jump on people, when they bark too loudly, and when they have too much energy and knock the baby down during playtime. The problem lies in the definition. Humans can easily understand the concept of ‘no’. Dogs don’t. Why?
Because most owners have no definition of the word.
A key concept of training is to accurately depict what exactly we want the dog to do. Do the owners want their dog to greet guests in a sit or is standing ok? Do you want your dog to lie down with legs out to the side or parallel to the front? In order to be trained to near perfection, a behavior must be broken down into these fine details.
‘No’ is not a behavior. It has no meaning to a dog unless we give it one. Just saying it isn’t going to stop your dog from performing bad behaviors; its only purpose is to increase the owner’s frustration when the dog doesn’t listen. However, just like any other cue, we can put a behavior to the word and teach our dogs the word ‘no’.
I’m not a big fan of using the word in general during training (it takes just as much energy to teach the dog an alternative behavior or a different cue) but we can teach ‘no’ to mean anything we want so long as it remains consistent. If we teach a dog to sit on her butt, then we can’t expect her to lie down or roll over. Once we’ve taught what ‘no’ means it can then be applied to different situations and environments.
So what’s the point of using the word ‘no’? There really isn’t one. Most of the behaviors that cause owners to yell the word at their rambunctious puppies can be solved with training and proper enrichment. The next time you catch yourself telling your dog ‘no’, consider whether it’s really solving anything or if you’re just asking your dog to do something it doesn’t know how to do in a language it doesn’t understand.
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