Why Doesn’t Shouting Or Punishment Work?
Everyone gets angry or frustrated, and when you feel like you’ve tried everything and nothing works, it can be easy to get annoyed – especially if you come home to a destroyed room, annoyed neighbours or mess everywhere.
But it’s so important to try to hide that from your dog, try to stay calm and patient. Clean up any mess as if it’s not a big deal.
Punishing your dog by shouting, smacking or worse will never help the situation.
Shouting at your dog makes them afraid of you, it destroys the trust and bond between you and masks them nervous and anxious.
If you were to come home to find the bin has been emptied on the kitchen floor, and you get angry, even if you don’t say anything, your dog will be able to tell by your body language.
You have to train yourself to just treat as no big deal.
Your dog will act in a way that we see as guilty, but actually, they are just being submissive and trying to make us happy.
Their ears will go flat against their heads, they might try to shrink into the floor, have their tails between their legs and even partially close their eyes and look away from you.
We perceive this as guilty, when actually the dog is just displaying appeasement behaviour.
They sense you are angry and so revert to these actions to try and make you happy and to diffuse the tension.
If you come home to a mess and shout at your dog, your dog then associates you coming home with shouting and fear.
They can’t comprehend that you are angry at the mess they did half an hour ago, their brains don’t understand that, they aren’t complex enough. Your dog just knows you’re home and angry with them. So they begin to fear you coming home.
A dog will only comprehend a punishment if it is done immediately. Same as they will only understand praise for non-barking if you praise them at the immediate time they stop!
They can’t think in periods of time like we can.
Your dog doesn’t know that they have done something wrong, they haven’t done it on purpose to be naughty, they are acting out because of the way they feel – it’s their way of showing their emotion.
If your dog is already anxious, you will make them worse by punishing them. If your dog wasn’t nervous or anxious before, it will become so because of your accidental actions.