How to keep your dog from begging
The first thing we all need to understand about pets is that animals perform behaviors for specific reasons. Animals tend to repeat behaviors that get rewarded and not repeat behaviors that are not rewarding in some way. It should be clear to everyone why begging is rewarding! It usually results in getting something delicious to eat. The instructions to the owners have to be STOP giving the dog food when it begs.
Most owners will say they have tried ignoring the begging but that does not work. Their pet became more persistent with the whining and barking or maybe it just continued to sit and stare until the owner could no longer ignore those eyes! No matter what the cause most people finally give in and give the dog some food. The owners have now taught the dog that if it is just persistent and does not give up, something delicious will be coming.
When teaching an animal a new behavior, we start out doing continuous reinforcement. Which is giving food treats every time the animal does the new behavior. Once the animal has learned a behavior you should start rewarding intermittently. Intermittent reinforcement is one of the most powerful forms of reinforcement there is. You are then acting like a slot machine, not giving reward every time they do the behavior. The dog will continue to display the behavior because it never knows when or if it will be rewarded for the behavior. With this method the behavior becomes very firmly established. (This is why people gamble)
Extinction behavior: Owners sometime decide to fix bad behaviors and the behaviors seem to take a while to disappear, or they keep cropping up. The owner wants to know how long the new behavior will last, or will the bad behavior come back? Some owners do not realize that old behaviors will not be permanently erased from the dog’s memory. Owners need to know that appropriate behaviors persist as long as we continue to reinforce them and prevent the bad behaviors from being reinforced, or getting attention for them.
So the first instruction to give clients is to not put the dog in a position where it can beg. If we are working on begging then the dog needs to be kenneled while the family is eating. This is a good time to give the dogs a squirrel or other food puzzles to focus on. The animal is then well rewarded for being away from the family and food. If the owners really want the begging to go away everybody in the family needs to be in agreement about this in order for it to work. Any time there is food out the dog should be kenneled. It is at this point that the outcome will depend on the pet owners being more persistent than their animals. With patience and knowledge about how animals learn the owners will get the unwanted behavior to become extinct.
