Hi all!
This is my first post on the forums. I'm Philip, proud dad to Simba (pic) , a 7 month old lab. Simba joined our family when he was just 5 weeks after my girlfriend's friend had to give him up. Since we weren't planing on adopting a dog so we didn't have much time to research training techniques and we've been winging it. So far so good it seems, Simba is very well behaved and there's not basic training that we need to do and we're moving on to cool tricks like fetching Dad a beer. One of the basics that is still pending is having him not eat the neighbors trash.
We live in an urban area and people take their trash out to the curb every night for pick up. I'm pretty sure that Simba will eat absolutely anything but the putrid garbage seems to be some sort of doggy ice-cream. Simba knows that he's not supposed to eat the garbage and if he's close to me he usually won't even try and if I tell him no he'll stop and drop what ever he's managed to stuff in his mouth, but if he thinks I'm not looking or if he's far enough away he'll try and gulp it down before I can catch him. I figured that I could get a remote electroshock collar in order to try and work on this issue and I joined the forum in order to get recommendations on the different models (there is a huge range of prices between different ones). After doing some searching I was shocked (pardon my pun) by the negative opinions about these training collars and indeed some of the techniques I've used (which were just common sense applications of basic pavlovian conditioning). I even saw someone mention that people who use training collars are actually closet sadists!
Why is carrot and stick conditioning not recommended? Like I mentioned, having not studied anything about dog training specifically I just relied on my vague recall of freshman psych, I mean Pavlov was famous for his dogs after all. In our case it's certainly worked well. What's the reason not to use remote collars and the like? If not a remote collar, what would be another good technique to change this behavior?
This is my first post on the forums. I'm Philip, proud dad to Simba (pic) , a 7 month old lab. Simba joined our family when he was just 5 weeks after my girlfriend's friend had to give him up. Since we weren't planing on adopting a dog so we didn't have much time to research training techniques and we've been winging it. So far so good it seems, Simba is very well behaved and there's not basic training that we need to do and we're moving on to cool tricks like fetching Dad a beer. One of the basics that is still pending is having him not eat the neighbors trash.
We live in an urban area and people take their trash out to the curb every night for pick up. I'm pretty sure that Simba will eat absolutely anything but the putrid garbage seems to be some sort of doggy ice-cream. Simba knows that he's not supposed to eat the garbage and if he's close to me he usually won't even try and if I tell him no he'll stop and drop what ever he's managed to stuff in his mouth, but if he thinks I'm not looking or if he's far enough away he'll try and gulp it down before I can catch him. I figured that I could get a remote electroshock collar in order to try and work on this issue and I joined the forum in order to get recommendations on the different models (there is a huge range of prices between different ones). After doing some searching I was shocked (pardon my pun) by the negative opinions about these training collars and indeed some of the techniques I've used (which were just common sense applications of basic pavlovian conditioning). I even saw someone mention that people who use training collars are actually closet sadists!
Why is carrot and stick conditioning not recommended? Like I mentioned, having not studied anything about dog training specifically I just relied on my vague recall of freshman psych, I mean Pavlov was famous for his dogs after all. In our case it's certainly worked well. What's the reason not to use remote collars and the like? If not a remote collar, what would be another good technique to change this behavior?