henry'smum

Worm...we hadnt noticed either!
Sookieball, Henry instantly listens to his daddy, he listens to me most of the time but sometimes he looks at me and tells me he has heard but doesnt want to obey and that is when we use the magical treat bag. It is reserved for the est most delicious treats that grab his attention. Maybe for xmas get your family members a treat bag each and get Mimi to realise that they are valuable members of her community too!

sookieball

haha i guess the nose is their weakness huh?
well thank you guys for the advices and help!
ill be posting up pix and inserting help where i can! thanks again!

Mikey T

But this is just one aspect of the cause of the problem. the other is how dogs learn and unrealist expectation on humans because of how they learn.
When humans learn something new they look to find other situation to apply it dog that is they tend to generalize the knowledge to other situations. dogs are very dirfferent they tend to look how what they learned applys specifical to the particular situation and what differenatiate that situation from others. Teach a dog to sit in the kitchen that is what the dog learn to sit in the kitchen So it will often look at you funny when you astk for a sit in the livingroom. It is a different context that must be retrained so ionorder for dogs to generalize a behavior it must occur in 100/s or thousand of different context. now Even if you do all that and soame one else ask the dog to sit it likely will not because akk the cinbtext it learned to sit involved you given the command not someone else. So unless the other in the household take the time to train the dog they are not going to have the respect of the dog nor is the dog going to even unsterand the command because it is given in a alien context

see The Sit Test
[quote]
Even minor changes in routine can produce dramatic decreases in reliability. For example, it is easy to demonstrate that an OTCh dog doesn't really know what "Sit" means. Dogs are extremely fine discriminators. If the dog has been taught to "Sit" for supper in the kitchen, or to heel-sit and front and finish in obedience class, that's precisely what the dog learns -- to sit in the kichen and in class. The same dog may occasionally not sit in the obedience ring, while playing in the park, or while greeting visitors at the front door. The dog must be trained in an infinite number of situations for it to generalise the "Sit" command to all instances. (This is in marked contrast to people, many of whom will generalise at the drop of a hat - sometimes from a single experience). [quote]
OTCH = obedience champion

Mikey T

just to givern you an idea the importance of leadership and trust in trining a dog I have to look no further thant the dog "toughy" in my avatar. aMy mother actual did most of thre basic agility training with him because there was no way I was going to waste my time training a dog that walked around stick laying flat on the ground to do agility. He proved me wrong and was a fairly quick study/ However in one brief moment during training with my mother he lost all confidence in her and never listened to her again unless she had the food bowl in her hand . She decide to train him to sit Pretty (sitting up on the hind end only) whell see got him up on his hind end and being the eceptional agility dog he was propmtly fell over backward. He never trusted her after that. Trust is something you have to earn,