Correcting - is this true?

[Barefoot]

Yeah, so much for the idea that dogs never feel bad when they break the rules...

You're confusing this with thinking that dogs can connect a past act to a current correction. They're not at all the same thing. No one, in this thread at least, has suggested that dogs don't understand when they're breaking the rules.

 

It's a very different thing for a dog to know they're breaking the rules when they're doing it than it is for the dog to understand that you're talking to them now about something that happened in the past.

[Barefoot]

I wish I could convince the people that I meet that they have conditioned their dogs to look (ashamed, guilty, chagrined, fill in the blank) when they come home, or say to the dog "what have you done!?", or (fill in the blank). And that the dogs do not understand why they are being punished.

I wish I could get them to understand that, in fact, that kind of punishment is abusive. But they very rarely listen to me, because they are sooo convinced that they "know" their dog ever so well, and "know" that the dog knows he or she has done something bad, because that is the interpretation they are putting on the dog's behavior, and they are certain it is accurate. It is very sad, because I encounter this all the time, and I feel ever so badly for the dogs.

It is a shame. Many people are more interested in anthropomorphizing than they are in anything else when it comes to their dogs. It makes them feel good, which is part of the reason we all have dogs, but it also leads to a lot of confusion.

 

One exercise I've used to try to drive this point home is to leave with the owner. I say I want to witness the dog's reaction to the owner coming home. We put some really nice treats in the trash for the dog to entice it into misbehaving and leave for a couple of hours. When we come back, I'm observing the owner as much as the dogs. I enter right in front of the owner so I can see the dog, and then watch as the owner comes in behind me.

 

What amazes me most is how unaware people are of their own body language. Sure enough as soon as the owner spots the mess their shoulders slump, sometimes they put their hands on their hips, or sigh; then the dogs ears drop and it comes scuttling over, or slinks away. Whenever the owner is done with their typical reaction I ask them to explain things to me. Almost invariably at some point they proclaim "oh, she knows what she's done".

 

The twist on this exercise is that I've made sure the dog has not done anything wrong. I have a helper remove the dog from the house and then go and rifle through the trash, and then have them return the dog and keep an eye on it until we pull back up to the house. It hasn't failed yet to be an eye opener for owners. When I ask how the dog could know what it's done when it hasn't done anything, they usually start to listen. Unfortunately, not always.