It’s tricky feeding a multiple dog household sometimes. I often put hot dogs in the food to get the dogs eating quickly, to avoid squabbling and grabbing the food of others. After awhile, they are all used to eating appropriately and quickly. Rose has always been a problem. She watches me to see if I am heading out to work, and will abandon her food in a second if I put my work jacket on. Often, she skips a meal, sometimes for a day, or even two. She is a finicky eater, avoiding food if there is anything new or strange in it. Rose is a complex creature, hyper-vigilant, work obsessed, distractable.
Sometimes, the other dogs will wait and try and get her food, so I have to police that. I’m not a patient person, so over the years I’ve gotten into the bad habit of cajoling her, urging her to eat, moving the bowl around to catch her interest. I have reinforced her distraction and pickiness by expressing irritation, pleading with her, urging her to eat (because I am busy and don’t like to stand around waiting for her to get to it). With dogs, we often drift into bad training habits without even thinking about it, so that they become normal. It takes enormous discipline and patience to train a dog well, and those are not my dominant traits.
A few weeks ago, I woke up and thought it through. The best way to get a dog to stop an unwanted behavior is to ignore it, and wait for the right behavior to praise or reinforce. So I put the bowl down, and simply ignored Rose. After five minutes, when the other dogs were generally done, I picked up the bowl and saved it for later, out of sight. No matter what Rose did – where she looked, what she did – I ignored her. She had five minutes to eat. The first day or so, I picked the bowl up twice. The next morning, she was hungry, and began eating. Then she drifted to the door when I moved away from the kitchen counter. I picked up the bowl.
By the third day, Rose was going to the bowl, eating all of her food. Sometimes, she looked for me, but I was not paying attention to her, not even in the room usually. After two weeks, she is eating normally and quickly, and every time. The lessons is clear to me. Don’t reinforce unwanted behaviors by talking, coaxing, speaking. Dog behaviors are reinforced by attention, much of which is unconscious. Left to their own devices, they will, of course, eat. I have heard of very few dogs in America who starve to death, given any choice.
The less attention I paid to Rose, the better her eating habits. I had reinforced a problem for years, and fixed it in a couple of weeks. I guess I knew that to begin with, but it’s so easy to forget. You create the environment for the good behavior to occur, and reinforce it when it does. It’s such a simple notion, so difficult for so many to execute.
