Training your dog by training yourself
Of
course, Lucy isn't a saint. She's been known to carry off tools
and spread the contents of trash bags all across the yard. She
used to tear up the garden pretty badly too, running across raised beds
and choosing a few as favorite napping spots.
Dogs aren't large
picture thinkers the way we are --- I'm pretty sure
that I could train her not to chew on a tool, but I'd have to train her
on every tool we own to really get the point across. Similarly,
Mark
trained her not to go in the front door of the barn...but then caught
her trotting through the back door because all she got out of the
training was
"don't go through the front door" not "don't go in the barn."
In cases like this,
we've figured out that it's better to train
ourselves rather than train the dog. How hard is it to keep trash
in the barn and gloves in the house? We also developed
main paths
in the garden based
on Lucy's regular routes, and when necessary put
branches on the beds she was obsessed with to physically keep her
off. In our early days on the farm, I yelled at Lucy a lot.
Now, we've trained her and she's trained us and we're like a happy
married couple.
| This post is part of our Training a Farm Dog lunchtime series.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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