Episode 8 – Is obedience the solution to all our problems?

Hello and welcome to episode 8 of Animale Thérapie, the animal behaviour podcast.

In this episode, we’re going to talk about obedience and “Is it really what solves all our problems with our pets? Because we’ve all had our little puppy or dog at home and immediately thought “OK, he’s at home now, but I absolutely have to teach him the basic commands so that he can live safely with us and our children, without any problems or aggression, That our children can also take him out for a walk if we need to, that if I go out for a walk or anywhere else, he’ll be OK with stopping, for example, on a terrace for a coffee or whatever situation we find ourselves in, but in any case, our dog absolutely has to be able to handle these situations. Our first instinct is going to be to say to ourselves “I’ve got to teach him to stop on command, to sit on command, to lie down on command.

The first reflex, which isn’t bad in itself, is to contact the nearest puppy school you have and take your puppy along to teach him the basic tricks and socialise him as much as possible with other dogs. This is often very good and helps to meet certain needs of the dog, such as mental expenditure, exploration, teaching him things, getting his cognitive abilities to work, getting to know other dogs, seeing other humans and starting to familiarise himself with situations that are slightly different from those you might encounter at home. There are many advantages to going to puppy school. But there are some people who, despite all the investment they’ve made, despite all the time they’ve spent in puppy school doing exactly what they’ve been asked to do for themselves and their dogs, find that the problem behaviours they encounter, whether at home or on walks or anywhere else, continue. It’s as if all the investment you put into this situation wasn’t enough to solve the problems.

Does the problem ultimately come from you? Would it come from the puppy school or at least from what you do at the puppy school or would it not come from the puppy himself? Because he’s stubborn, because he does the wrong things, and so on. As far as being stubborn and all the labels you could put on an animal’s head are concerned, I refer you to a podcast episode, episode 2, that I did on labels and all the beliefs they convey and all the consequences they can have in our day-to-day lives with our animals. I won’t cover that in this episode, simply because I’ve already covered it. Now, in relation to everything we’ve talked about, and before saying that it’s one person’s fault or the other’s fault because it’s irrelevant, I’d like us to start by looking at why the behaviour is emitted by the animal? What causes bad behaviour, or rather undesirable behaviour, since there is no such thing as good or bad behaviour, it’s a value judgement in relation to our expectations, but what causes a behaviour to appear and be maintained over time?

Just by asking this question, we begin to take an interest in the animal and the conditions that led to the undesirable behaviour. And that’s absolutely essential, because behaviour is never aberrant. It never exists for nothing and it certainly doesn’t exist to annoy us, to take revenge on us as humans or for the pleasure of simply doing something stupid and nasty by the dog or any other animal for that matter. Behaviour exists because there are environmental conditions that are favourable to its expression. The environmental conditions may be in the external environment, what the animal, for example, encounters, sees, touches, smells or listens to, or in the internal environment, in relation, for example, to hormonal phases or periods in its life or to the emotions it feels. In fact, if you like, what you need to understand is that behaviour is ultimately the symptom of all the experiences the animal has undergone. It’s the tip of the iceberg. Finally, when you start to take an interest in behaviour and why it exists and why it’s maintained, then you start to really try to understand your animal and why a behaviour exists.

I’ll give you a fairly simple example. You could have a dog that pulls on a lead. That’s bad behaviour or undesirable behaviour which we find problematic and which can also be problematic for the dog, because it can hurt itself, because it’s not pleasant for anyone to be pulled along on a walk. So you could have an undesirable behaviour of pulling on the lead. Our first instinct is to respond with obedience. We want the dog to stop. So what are we going to do? We’ll pull back, we’ll stop, we’ll turn around during the walk, for example. We’ll try to do things to make the behaviour stop. And in the end, in most cases, we’re not interested in why the behaviour exists in the first place. Why is this dog going to choose to pull on the lead when it’s not even necessarily good for him either, because he too gets hurt and he’s no dumber than anyone else. He hurts himself too, but his motives may be more important than the pain he might feel or the discomfort that might be caused by pulling on the lead. So he’s no more stupid than anyone else. You mustn’t take them for fools. I can assure you that if he does this, it’s for a reason.

So why is this? There could be tons of reasons. You could very well have a dog that wants to express a predatory behaviour, that has a very important predatory sequence and you take it to a place where there are stimuli that are favourable to the expression of this behaviour. Perhaps there are particular smells, perhaps it has seen a rabbit in the distance. In short, maybe there’s something that triggers the predatory behaviour and so it starts pulling on the lead. And it’s not to annoy us, it’s not to hurt our arms, it’s not on purpose. It’s simply because the predation sequence is stronger and more motivating than simply staying close to you.

You could have a dog who pulls on the lead because he’s been frightened by a noise and is trying to get away, and his fear, this emotion of fear, is much more important than simply staying next to you. You could have a dog who simply wants to go and smell something or go and play with friends. The motivation to perform these behaviours is also greater because these are highly motivating events, which are also very short in the individual’s day compared with all the times he’ll be next to you during the day. Finally, going out to play with friends is rarer, so it’s perhaps more valuable. Maybe it’s more motivating. Or you could have a dog that pulls on a lead because it reacts to cars, for example. As soon as there’s a car, he’ll start pulling like mad, either in the direction of the car or in the opposite direction, depending on his behaviour, it doesn’t matter, but in any case, what we’ve observed is that the same behaviour, pulling on the lead, can have lots of different reasons.

And we will not regulate the same behaviour in the same way if, for example, it is to manage predation, if it is for reactivity, if it is because he was afraid of a noise or if it is because he simply wants to go and play with friends. This question of why is super important and most of the time it’s not asked. That’s the problem with blind obedience. It’s that we want absolute obedience from the animal without being interested in why it behaves as it does. The problem is that most of the time, without solving the why, without looking at the animal’s motivations, you simply risk coming into conflict with the animal because you want to give it an order. You want to blindly stop the behaviour without taking an interest in the animal and its motivations. The risk is that it will continue to have the same motivations as before. Maybe it will still be just as scared. Maybe it will still want to predate just as much. Maybe there will be tons and tons of reasons that haven’t been addressed. And so the problem is that we risk coming into conflict with our dog.

What happens if the animal doesn’t obey when asked? Most of the time, we’ll want to punish the behaviour that occurs instead of the command. For example, if our dog is pulling on the lead, we ask him to ‘wait’ or ‘heel’, but if he doesn’t do this and continues to pull on the lead and pulls even harder than before, what’s going to happen? You’re going to pull back, you’re going to get angry, you’re going to tell him no, you’re going to get into a conflict with your dog. And that’s not pleasant for anyone, not for him and not for us either. What are we going to do if, for example, our dog jumps on us? We’ll ask him to ‘sit’. And if he doesn’t, what are we going to do? We might get angry. We’ll try to intimidate him so that he stops, we’ll try to ignore him. We’ve noticed that most of the time, in these kinds of cases, when we ignore the dog, it doesn’t work either because, in fact, we’re still not answering why the behaviour exists. Maybe our dog was suffering from separation anxiety and seeing us come back into the house triggers extremely intense emotions in him and jumping on us is just the product, the logical consequence, the symptom of the emotion he felt. At that point, asking him to ‘sit down’ won’t be very complicated because you haven’t solved the basic problem. And the basic problem is the emotions he felt while we were away. And so, if we wanted, for example, in this kind of case, to train the fact that it jumps on us to make it stop, for one reason or another, because you can have children, you can have a very big dog that weighs 40, 50 kilos and it’s dangerous for them or elderly people too, for whom it’s dangerous because they risk falling and hurting themselves.

We absolutely must manage this behaviour, for everyone’s safety. If we simply want to work blindly on the “sit” and we’re not interested in the emotion that was felt beforehand, or why, in the end, the dog behaved in that way, the risk is that this purely educational work on obedience won’t work at all. As it may not work, we may gradually end up in more and more conflicts with the animal and we may also increase the value of our response to the dog. As the dog continues the behaviour, we’ll continue to insist, using the same methods. And if, for example, asking the dog to sit down, even giving it a treat, isn’t enough because there are other things at stake, perhaps we’ll start to punish or intimidate it. For example, it could be the same thing with a dog that barks when people pass in front of the house. We’ll ask it to be quiet, but if it doesn’t shut up, we’ll get into a conflict with the dog. We’ll use intimidation, and sometimes even get physical, to get the dog to stop. In the worst cases, electric collars will be used to make the animal stop the behaviour.
And then we come to punishment. Punishment means stopping or reducing the frequency of a behavior. The aim of punishing a behavior is to make it stop or go away. And that’s everything we don’t want to do with behavior. We don’t want to suppress behavior. What you must never, never, never forget about behavior, really, put it in the back of your mind, is that behavior is a form of communication. Behavior is a symptom, and you don’t want to stop a symptom. We want to take it into account, and now we want to look for and explore the clues as to why this behavior exists. Why is there a symptom? And we’re going to play detective. Okay, so now that there’s a symptom, what’s going on? Why does my dog do it? Why does my parrot scream all the time? If I tell him no, if I throw things at his cage, will it change anything? Will he get scared every time he screams? Maybe it will. Maybe it will reduce the frequency of the “screaming” behavior.

Yes, but. If he’s screaming because he’s feeling really bad, if he’s screaming for all sorts of reasons because, again, screaming can be like barking in a dog. There could be any number of reasons why the behavior exists. And by simply wanting to extinguish the behavior, by wanting blind obedience, the risk is that the problem behavior will shift to another problem behavior, because the underlying problem is still unresolved, because the emotion is still there, it’s still latent. If, for example, you’re a child, you hurt yourself, you cry and now you’re being punished for crying, will that prevent you from hurting yourself in the same way next time, if you fall again and scrape your knee? No, of course not. Maybe, on the other hand, you’ll handle the situation differently. Maybe you’ll get angry. Maybe you’ll be unbearable all day afterwards. In any case, there may be other consequences, other types of behavior that will emerge and that may be even more difficult to link to the trigger.

That’s my point. We don’t want to simply stop at the problem behavior and blindly try to stop it. We want to look at why the behavior exists, and then come up with a solution that will help everyone – not just animals, but humans too, of course. It works both ways. We’ll be able to make that effort, to understand why the animal liked the behavior it did, and then adapt to it.

Behavior is an element of communication, and you don’t want to turn it off, because if you do, there are bound to be consequences at some point. Emotions can trigger behavior, and to want to turn behavior off is to be deaf and blind to the emotions your pet is feeling at the time. Maybe the behavior wasn’t triggered by an emotion, maybe it’s something else. But in any case, you have to be able to try and find out. Do your detective work. Ask yourself why the behavior exists. When someone advises you to put a choke collar on your dog to stop the behavior, it’s because they’re not addressing the underlying problem. When we tell you to put your dog in a crate because he destroys on your absence, we’re making the problem behavior stop, but are we really solving the problem? Most of the time, what we observe is that if there was a problem linked to separation, a problem linked to loneliness, the problem behaviors won’t stop. Maybe there won’t be any more destruction, of course, since the animal is confined and environmental conditions won’t allow it. On the other hand, what’s likely to happen is that other problem behaviors will emerge, because we still haven’t resolved the emotion that was felt when your pet was left alone at home. So it’s likely to manifest itself in other ways. I’ve already seen dogs who were certainly prevented from destroying everything, but who were still messing about, who were wetting themselves in the cage, who were trying to bite the bars, who were trying to get out of the cage and even hurting themselves, pulling out teeth, breaking teeth, twisting their jaws, bleeding, trying to scratch, pulling out claws. I’ve already seen some really powerful things happen, or behaviors that are going to be totally different and end up sounding like howling. So what’s next? It’s going to be “Let’s put his dog in a cage with an electric collar, so he can’t destroy, howl or bark.” Sure, but what do you do with your emotion when you do that? We’re trampling all over it, forgetting about the individual behind the behavior every time we do this kind of thing.

Always ask yourself the question “Why does the behavior exist?” Because once you’ve asked the question, you’re bound to find your way to the solution. It may not be a straight line, that’s for sure. Because an individual is complex and needs to be understood in all its complexity. So there can be many reasons for the same behavior. It’s never a straight line, and that’s why calling in a professional in this kind of case will help you, because he’ll be able to provide that expertise. He has the necessary expertise to help you see the situation more clearly and come up with one or more lasting solutions, an action plan tailored to your situation and your dog.

Above all, remember that the same symptom does not have the same reasons for existing, and that behavior is always, always communication. Your pet doesn’t do this to annoy you. He’s doing it because it’s either the product of his experience, or it’s simply some emotion or other that appears at the time and triggers automatic behavioral responses, since emotions also trigger physiological and behavioral responses. There will be changes in behavior, and that’s normal. We don’t want to get into a conflict with our dog. We don’t want to escalate our punitive strategies until we’ve stopped the undesirable behaviour, because we’re forgetting our pet in the middle of all this. We’re forgetting about his well-being. All we want in that case is what? Blind obedience? We’re simply interested in what we think is acceptable behavior, without taking an interest in the animal behind it.

If it were the same for us, if, for example, we emitted a behavior, for example, we’re extremely hungry, OK, so we’re motivated to go to the fridge to get something to eat. But let’s say, at that moment, we’re punished because it’s not time to eat. Okay, but when is it time to eat? What if, after all, we weren’t allowed to eat for two days for some completely arbitrary reason? Then we’ll do everything in our power to find something to eat, because we’re hungry. And so, we risk being punished again and again because, let’s say, our guardian at the time isn’t interested in why the behavior is occurring. All he wants is for us to obey for a reason of his own, a reason that is arbitrary for us. It’s arbitrary from our point of view. And the elements of behavior that we want to exist alongside us, in our captive environment, for our animals, from their point of view, is totally arbitrary. It’s certainly for their well-being too, of course. Teaching your dog to behave well in a city situation, for example, is absolutely necessary for his well-being too, to have tools, to know how to behave in certain situations.

But if we don’t take an interest in problem behaviours when they occur, if we’re not interested in the whys and we just want pure, unadulterated, blind obedience to our pet’s behavioural elements, then we run the risk of missing out on things that are extremely strong and extremely important to him. And, above all, we run the risk of never solving the problem. Quite simply because we never addressed it in the first place, because we never paid any attention to it, or perhaps because we were simply mistaken about the reason why the behavior existed in the first place. Behavior doesn’t exist to annoy. It doesn’t exist to get even. It exists because there’s a reason that’s unique to you. And there are tons of reasons, as I mentioned in the examples I gave earlier. So, if I had to sum up this whole podcast, behavior is an element of communication. Always, always, always. So don’t try to turn off behavior when you see it. It’s difficult because it requires a switch in our brain, a switch in the way we experience events.

We live in a very punitive culture. We’re us, we’ve been taught that when it’s something, it’s like that and no other. Yes, of course, but our animals don’t have the words to explain themselves and for us to understand them. All they have is their behaviour. And so, if we’re deaf to their behavior, what’s left for them to make themselves understood? Nothing. As a result, their behavior is likely to increase in intensity, because it’s always motivated by the same reasons that we haven’t yet addressed. In the end, we risk ending up in more and more conflicts with our pet. And that’s not why we want to have a pet in the first place. I don’t think anyone here wants to get a dog and spend all their time fighting it, to get it to stop barking. Nobody wants to have a dog to spend all their time saying no to it, as if its middle name had finally become “no”. It’s the same if you have a cat, it’s the same if you have a parrot. You have to address the problem, because if you don’t, you’ll never solve it.

For me, I’ve touched on the points that are absolutely essential to this theme. Always ask yourself, when a behavior exists, are you really addressing the underlying problem? And if not, don’t hesitate to get help from a professional who’s a real behavior specialist and who can help you pinpoint the problem and draw up an action plan tailored to your situation and your pet. This is really the most important thing. If you haven’t already done so, I invite you to sign up for my newsletter because I regularly send out sourced, science-based articles that help you learn more, and it’s totally free.

I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. If you have any questions or comments about today’s episode, don’t hesitate to comment. By the way, in the comments section too, you’re more than welcome to suggest an upcoming topic that’s close to your heart. You can also join my Instagram and Facebook for more information, tips and free resources under the handle @animalethérapie. Do you have a behavioral concern with your pet, or would you like ethical and professional support? You can contact me directly at contact@animaletherapie.com and I’ll see you soon for a new episode.