Set Your Dog up to Fail

Collectively, we have tons of issues surrounding failure. Why? Because we believe that any failure no matter how small, is something that will be painful and impossible to work through. Naturally, because we love our children and our dogs, we want to protect them from anything that might cause undue pain or stress.  It's why we put training wheels on bikes. It's why participation awards are a thing. It's why we put up with so much undesired behavior from our dogs. 

However, I believe that our beliefs about failure (and pain) are based on some unfounded premises. The first being that all pain is bad. Despite living in literally the safest, richest period in the history of humanity, kids today are suffering from sky high levels of depression, anxiety, and suicide. Children no longer have to work in factories, in fact there are laws against this. Children don't even have to look stuff up in encyclopedias, most information is just a search term away. 

Compared to the rest of their evolutionary history, dogs have made out pretty good too. Pet dogs do not have to work for their meals. They get to live inside, with us, in some cases even sleeping with us in our beds. They get free veterinary care, protection from predators, and lots of doting from their human counterparts. The industry devoted to their care and upkeep totaled over $62 billion in 2016, nearly quadrupling it's totals from 1994. However, despite all the money and effort and resources we put into pet dogs, we still see a ton of problems. Many dogs live lives of containment, and cannot ever be let off leash outside of their homes. Some dogs cannot even go on walks due to their extreme pulling and reactivity. 

By all the metrics on health and safety  (freedom from pain), we should be the happiest we've ever been. Why aren't we? I believe it comes from our problematic relationship to failure. 

One thing I see many owners struggling with is that moment where they know their dog is about to behave in a way they have stated they don't like (fail). Bolting the door comes to mind. It's typically the first thing we tackle in private lessons, because it's a behavior that gets practiced multiple times per day. 

In order to teach the dog a new way of being around thresholds, I have to coach the owner to go ahead and allow the dog to do the behavior, to go ahead and allow them to fail. This is so that the dog can be presented with a new boundary and the opportunity to make a course correction. Though most owners agree in theory, when it comes down to it, most are very resistant to let the dog make the mistake. Their tendency is to "help" the dog, by slowing their pace up to the threshold and opening the door reeeeeally slowly. It's almost as if they want to give their dog lots of chances to get it right. They don't want to be the ones to have to give a correction (discomfort), even if their dog's behavior has been causing owners literally years of pain. 

I might also set the dog up to fail by using other dogs (a trigger for leash reactive dogs), or riding a bike past them, or giving food to target resource guarding. It's a very planned thing, and it can be easy to fall into the trap of labeling it as "unfair" to the dog. I don't really see it that way. I see it as manipulating the dog's environment in order to teach new, preferable behaviors - which is what we've been doing for literally thousands of years, by the way. 

Change is hard. Our brains are wired to resist it, especially with behaviors that have been working. However, for some dogs, change means the difference between being allowed to stay with a family or going to the pound. So for this reason, I must stand on the side of the dogs, even if it's hard, and even if it means experiencing some temporary discomfort. I encourage you to look at your relationship to failure, and examine whether are your beliefs about failure, pain, and discomfort are rational, or whether there are some cognitive distortions that might be keeping you from a better relationship with your dog. Because on the other side of failure, is growth.