April 13, 2020

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Are you interacting with your dog in a positive manner? If not, it could be having a negative affect on their behavior. Believe it or not, the way you connect with your pooch can dramatically improve or ruin the state of their health. Dogs are naturally empathetic and sensitive creatures. They can easily pick up on people’s emotions and react to them accordingly. That’s why when your dog is doing something they shouldn’t be or not performing well during their training session, you should do anything but yell at them. Patience is key with dogs, so here are 5 reasons you shouldn’t yell at your dog.

1. It’s inefficient

This might be obvious, but dogs don’t understand English. You might feel like they do, but they don’t. Going on and on to them, feeling like you’re getting a point across, will do nothing except cause more confusion and leave them clueless about what you’re ‘barking’ about. However, dogs do respond to short and precise cues that you most likely have already trained them to respond to. So by blurting out an arrangement of angry words, it will just frighten your dog. Also, consider how often you yell at your dog or get frustrated with them. You should try to limit yelling and spend more time on teaching them the right behaviors.

2. It creates confusion

If you come home to an accident on the kitchen floor, your immediate reaction might be to scold your dog for it. The main problem with this is that your dog won’t be able to associate the punishment with the crime. Sure, your dog will probably play the part and act like they know what they’re in trouble for, but they’re reacting to your anger at that moment. When it comes to training, good timing is crucial. The closest you can come to correcting their potty mistakes is to catch them in the act and take them outside to finish the job. If your dog makes it this far, I think some praises are in order.

3. It cause training problems

When your dog jumps up on guests to greet them, is your reaction to yell at them to get down? While yelling at your dog might momentarily suppress their reaction, it does not teach them what they should do instead. In fact, the same reaction will probably just repeat itself every time you have guests over. To bring a change to their behavior, you can’t just suppress your dog’s natural reactions. Instead, you need to teach them alternate behavior they can do instead of the behavior you don’t like. In this example, the dog can be taught to sit instead of jumping, or retreat to their safe area when guests come over.

4. It increases fearfulness

Some dogs are tough and can withstand even the most rough of times, while others have more delicate emotions and can hardly withstand even an angry look. With that being said, yelling isn’t a viable option for any dog. All dogs aren’t made the same, of course, and some with more delicate personalities can experience troubling training setbacks when yelled at, like submissive urination. Some dogs become helpless when dealing with a yelling owner.

5. It encourages bad behavior

While your dog is barking, you might think that yelling back will cause them to quiet down when in reality it wont. Actually, they will most likely take it as a welcoming to their noise. Once again, dogs don’t speak English, so yelling “knock it off!” to them won’t result in the action you’d hoped for. A better strategy is to pinpoint the cause of your dog’s barking and take the appropriate steps to resolve it.

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