yes absolutely ,in my post to Jessie the pup , when i said I beleive we have been saying the same thing , I meant me and you.
I'm not asking you to stop saying No to your dog

Ok , lets recap!
you say its the sound not word , the sound is the aversive which we hope will decrease the behaviour and if you keep using sound as an aversive and it works then the word doesnt matter.

But what if eventually you are able to stop using the aversive and be able to say No in your usual voice and the dogs stops. Isnt that better for you and the dog?

This is what pairing up a word and aversive allows you to do that . The word No in itself becomes a conditioned punisher so then you dont have to say it in an aversive way . (punisher here means something that decreases or stops the behaviour.)

I'm going to give a different example of pairing the word No with an aversive.
. Unfortunately trainers do this . Please dont do this anyone

The aversive is a prong collar or choke chain . say the word No in a normal voice and you jerk the choke hard and the dog stops what it is doing . if you do that a few times the dog associates the word No with the painful jerk . You then only have to say No in a normal way and the dog will remember the pain and stop what its doing.

You can choose any word to use but you must stick to the same word.

I would think that by now after all this time your dog would have an understanding of what the word No with out the sound affects means. Same as for saying Good.
I've given treats for Good and also the same excited voice and now I only have to say good in a normal and they know thay have got it right though its more fun doing silly voices.

Hal, Ben's father, actually understood words. We could say in a perfectly normal voice "shall we take Hal out?" and he would immediately be up and raring to go. It got to the stage when we had to say "are we going t-u-o?" - it started off as 0-u-t- but he learned that, so we had to deviate to t-u-o! Ben is nowhere near as clever as his father Hal, but nonetheless he understands a few words, not just the tone of the voice - in other words, I can say in a dead-pan voice "shall we go out?" and like his father, he is up and raring to go!

Having said all that, I don't think it matters one jot or iota whether you use words, single words, multiple words, or just sounds, as long as what you do is consistent the dog will learn to associate the word or the sound with the action which you desire him to take. Aversive training is totally unnecessary, it is throwing the baby out with the bath water and extremely cruel, we all know that. I train my dogs with consistency above everything, followed by assertiveness enforced with verbal reward. I do not train with treats, simply because my particular choice of dog are not particularly interested in food, I prefer to use praise ... vocal and physical.

(It is true that with Ben he was just so damaged, so completely shut down when we took him on that in order to be able to let him run free off the lead, we did have to use an e collar, and I am glad we did because otherwise he would likely have been euthanised by now because of these perianal fissures but that's going off the point, for which I apologise).

The bestest thing of all is that Jess is achieving success with building up a bond with her mouthy JRT ... best wishes to her and may they have a long, healthy and loving relationship. What a way to start the new year!!

O gosh ... I mustn't go off thread, but this is one of my pet hates! People who have seen Snow Dogs and want one. Breeders of both siberian huskies and alaskan malamutes state that they cannot be safely let off the lead (I don't actually accept this, but that's another story) but they neither have the time nor the money to run them in harness, so they are confined to a life of misery of possibly only a mile or 2 a day if they are lucky of on-lead walkies, and then the owners rehome them because they have eaten the house, the furniture, the pet hamster, the cat, the rabbit out of sheer boredom and frustration. A breed that is bred to run and run and run ... it is cruel in the extreme to confine a sibe or a mal to a life on a lead, unless you have a safe, large confined area to run them in or you work them in harness.

No, no does not stop Ben jumping at me when he has one of his mad moments ... but stepping assertively forwards into his space and raising my knee if necessary does the trick beautifully without injury to me or him! Yes, I agree about dogs cannoning into you ... unlike horses, sometimes they will run full tilt into you ... Hal did that to me several times, as well as jerking me completely off my feet and through the air when he took off after a rabbit or once memorably a hare!!

Gnasher steps down off her soap box and apologises abjectly for going off topic

We fostered a high % wolf cross a few years ago ... mother = wolf, father = czech wolfdog. He was therefore classified as an F1. We had him living with us between the ages of 9 and 16 weeks, and he was an absolute darling. He slept in our bedroom with Tai, our Utonagan, whom he worshipped. His job every single morning was to wake me up with wolf kisses, followed by bites on my nose!! Wolf kisses involve full on mouths, with tongues in mouth to ascertain what your last meal was and therefore your ranking ... God help a vegan or a veggie!! So, little F1 would wake me every morning with vigorous tongue action followed by nose bites ... extremely painful and very soon nipped in the bud!! Not by coughing, or ignoring, but by a short sharp ouch you little ****** followed by a very angry and assertive NO!!! That was fine ... but with his mother, the wolf, I thought it prudent just to let her get on with it ... as she weighed in at some 12 stone, far heavier than me at the time and her head was about twice my size, I just prayed to God that she was wormed regularly!!

Seriously though, it is a natural things for our dogs to want to lick us. Strictly speaking, we should not let them of course, but as I say, I don't have a problem with it if they are wormed regularly as I have a very strong immune system, but it really is not a very good idea and I certainly do not allow Ben or my daughter's dogs to lick my grandson.

My dogs are clean and healthy, it's just disgusting lol. Admittedly, I have no other reasons for not allowing it.

hear hear .
next thing will be adolescence!

I'm amending this to add . I think its important to consider
that if you have a timid dog or a dog that is shut down , that it could be that it hasn't understood but is simply anxious or scared and feels intimidated or even scared. Dogs will also stop doing things if they feel uncertain of what they are expected to do.

If your dog shows signs of lick lipping or yawning or looks away when you empathise No then it is stressed and you need to tone it down a bit . No pun intended





This feels like I'm talking to myself.

(Jess is the pups name) Pahahaha

absolutely agree ... ben had shut down when we took him on and only knew how to be aggressive .. we dealt with this with an assertive yet loving hand. With a breed like ben you have to be assertive because if you are not then he will view it as weakness and therefore makes him scared. A fearful dog who has shut down needs a strong leader .. hence the reason for an assertive yet loving hand. I cannot stress this strongly enough. A dog like ben is **** scared of an owner who is anything but assertive because it makes them feel so vulnerable. The last thing ben needs is owners who beat him, ignore him, shut him out. What a dog like ben needs is an owner who is always there for him, but will nick him with an electric collar to stop him running off into the wild blue yonder rather than confine his free spirit to a lead.

Ben gets it .. which is why we resorted to an e collar for stopping him running off and it worked.

I dont want to get into the shock collar debate here and I dont have much experience with Northern breeds. so lets take those out of the equation.

"A fearful dog who has shut down needs a strong leader .. hence the reason for an assertive yet loving hand."

I've guess you're into Cesar Millan. ! can you define what you mean by strong leader. Does this involve rank reduction , the going through doors and eating first stuff like jan fennel teaches?


A fearful dog need to know it has nothing to fear.