- Jul 26, 2010
- 2,969
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Pups naturally crawl out of the mother's nest to defecate when very, very young. They have an instinct to stay clean. Crate training just takes advantage of that.
I have to admit, the idea of taking a young animal and pushing its face into a pile - it bothers me. There are health issues, both with the person handling the dog, with the dog licking children, with the dog passing things to other dogs, of course, but just the idea of it bothers me. A pup is an innocent animal, and has an instinct to be clean. Even more so, I seriously doubt, knowing how dogs think, that it actually teaches them anything other than their human is very, very unpredictable and strange.
I think the idea of this sort of training arose a long long time ago, and the concept behind it is, that the dog defecated in the house to be mean. The idea is that the dog is doing it deliberately, knowingly.
Thinking about animals was like that, long, long ago. The general idea was that the dog knew very well what was wanted of it, but disobeyed for no other reason than to be disagreeable. At the time, a horse, for example that did not move forward when commanded, the trainer would take a cat, tie it to a long pole, whack the cat on the ground a few times, and then put it in between the horse's hind legs and get it to bite and claw. When a horse fell, it was not unusual to build a fire and burn it, to punish it for falling down. Training was so brutal that horses had to be blindfolded to be led to the training area.
Since that time, research, as well as experience, has shown that adversive training methods like these not only are unnecessary, but also that overall, they actually don't produce as good a result.
I have to admit, the idea of taking a young animal and pushing its face into a pile - it bothers me. There are health issues, both with the person handling the dog, with the dog licking children, with the dog passing things to other dogs, of course, but just the idea of it bothers me. A pup is an innocent animal, and has an instinct to be clean. Even more so, I seriously doubt, knowing how dogs think, that it actually teaches them anything other than their human is very, very unpredictable and strange.
I think the idea of this sort of training arose a long long time ago, and the concept behind it is, that the dog defecated in the house to be mean. The idea is that the dog is doing it deliberately, knowingly.
Thinking about animals was like that, long, long ago. The general idea was that the dog knew very well what was wanted of it, but disobeyed for no other reason than to be disagreeable. At the time, a horse, for example that did not move forward when commanded, the trainer would take a cat, tie it to a long pole, whack the cat on the ground a few times, and then put it in between the horse's hind legs and get it to bite and claw. When a horse fell, it was not unusual to build a fire and burn it, to punish it for falling down. Training was so brutal that horses had to be blindfolded to be led to the training area.
Since that time, research, as well as experience, has shown that adversive training methods like these not only are unnecessary, but also that overall, they actually don't produce as good a result.
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