From the Inside Flap
Why settle for anything less than a best friend? Every dog wants to perform -- and deservedly gain your love and affection. With Warren Eckstein's expert guidance, you can forget about frustration and disobedience, and enjoy years with a loyal, alert, and very happy dog! Here are wonderful insights, witty observations, and step-by-step advice for:
* Communicating with your dog
* Hassle-free housebreaking
*The training ABCs -- from sitting to heeling and beyond
* Diet, grooming, exercise and dentistry tips
* Coping with canine old age
* And much, much more!
"Too bad Warren isn't a marriage counselor! If only he could do for husbands what he does for dogs!" Kathie Lee Gifford
From the Back Cover
Why settle for anything less than a best friend? Every dog wants to perform -- and deservedly gain your love and affection. With Warren Eckstein's expert guidance, you can forget about frustration and disobedience, and enjoy years with a loyal, alert, and very happy dog! Here are wonderful insights, witty observations, and step-by-step advice for:
* Communicating with your dog
* Hassle-free housebreaking
*The training ABCs -- from sitting to heeling and beyond
* Diet, grooming, exercise and dentistry tips
* Coping with canine old age
* And much, much more!
"Too bad Warren isn't a marriage counselor! If only he could do for husbands what he does for dogs!" Kathie Lee Gifford
About the Author
Warren Eckstein is a noted pet psychologist and has worked with the animals of such celebrities as David Letterman, Cheryl Tiegs, and Lily Tomlin. He has his own nationally syndicated radio show telling owners how to best treat their pets. Warren and his co-author and wife, Andrea Eckstein, live on Long Island, New York, with their dogs, cats, pigs, and birds.
Andrea Eckstein co-wrote How to Get Your Dog to Do What You Want with her husband, noted pet psychologist Warren Eckstein.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
INTRODUCTION
Decades ago, owning a dog usually meant that Fido lived in a doghouse out on the family’s property. Fido was rarely permitted in the house; instead, the backyard and the front porch were his domain. Of course, he was a loyal companion to his owners and a friendly playmate to his owners’ children. More often than not, the family dog was named King, Princess, Duke, Dutchess, Fido, or Rover.
Today, it is not uncommon for the family dog to be named Sam, Sarah, Chester, Tiffany, Bob, or Suzy. This humanization of the family dog’s name reflects a major change in the way people view their canine companions. No longer merely animals, our pets are now beloved members of the family. In fact, today, more likely than not, these four-footed family members live inside the home and, in many cases, even sleep in the family bed!
Because we have taken animals—specifically, dogs—into our human environment, we can no longer treat them as animals and expect them to respond like humans. Instead, we must learn to integrate them into our lives and help them become a part of our human life-style. With a little understanding and patience, we can live happily with our dogs and they can live happily with us.
I firmly believe that your dog is a member of your family. If you keep that in mind, if you truly feel it, your dog will act like one. That’s one of the basic premises of this book. It’s the best way I know to get your dog to do what you want.
Okay. Once you accept the premise, we’ve got to decide exactly how to treat the new family member.
It’s really fairly simple—and the rest of this book is devoted to telling you just this: If you treat your dog with love, if you treat your dog with respect, if you treat your dog as if he or she is an intelligent, thinking animal capable of making decisions, your dog will respond in positive, astonishing ways.
But first you’ve got to understand not only that a dog thinks, but how and why he or she thinks.
Then and only then will you be able to get your dog to do what you want.
And you know what? By the time you reach that point, your dog is going to want to do the same things you want him or her to do. Not 100 percent of the time, of course. Nobody’s perfect. Besides, if you want something that obeys your every command every single time, you don’t want a dog—you want a robot! So go get a copy of Popular Mechanics or Science Digest. But if your goal is to turn Fido into an intelligent and loving member of the family, read on.
WHAT YOU PUT IN IS
WHAT YOU GET OUT
As far as I’m concerned, a dog is a product of what’s put into him. Two factors determine the personality, intelligence, and overall disposition of our canine companions: breeding—whether the parents were genetically well-suited to produce strong, healthy offspring (in the case of the randomly bred stray “generic” dog, whether the odds were in his favor), so that he was born physically sound, without inbreeding faults or any other genetic disorders—and environment—what the owner does or does not do with that dog. In other words, you play a tremendous role in influencing your dog’s personality, intelligence, and disposition!
A DOG’S SELF-IMAGE
Dogs, just like people, have a strange way of living up—or down—to the image you project for them. Give them high expectations concerning their own abilities, and they’ll reach for the stars trying to achieve them and please you. Downgrade their abilities by constantly telling them how displeased you are with their behavior, and you’ll rip apart their self-esteem, making it impossible for them to believe in you and, most of all, in themselves.
Fido needs a good self-image if he’s to attain the goals you set for him. I’m obviously not talking about graduating summa cum laude from Harvard or becoming the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, but I am talking about Fido attaining certain goals of good behavior—being socially well adjusted and blending well into your family unit, while also maintaining his own identity and psychological well-being. We take this for granted when everything is right with Fido. It’s the sort of thing you don’t think about until it’s not there.
It’s easy to tamper with how Fido feels about himself. There are three common ways. The first is a sin of omission—it often takes place without you even realizing it.
RIPPING APART FIDO’S SELF-IMAGE—WHAT NOT TO DO #1
By doing nothing, by ignoring your pet, by not interacting with him on a regular basis, you can do great damage. It is simply not enough just to feed and walk your dog, then treat him like a piece of furniture the rest of the time.
Yes, I know you lead busy lives and your time may be very limited, but dogs have a real need to have their egos stroked, to be told they’re good, to understand how much they’re loved. They need image- and confidence-building as much as we do. And they need a certain amount of self-esteem in order to behave well. They need to develop inner strength if they are to try something new or to learn to trust in you.
RIPPING APART FIDO’S SELF-IMAGE—WHAT NOT TO DO #2
Bad-mouthing Fido and spreading gossip about him is the second way you can rip apart Fido’s self-esteem and destroy his self-confidence, thereby creating psychological problems where they never before existed. Dogs are very astute and can sense a lot of what’s going on around them. Many are so clever that they can even tell when you’re speaking of them in unflattering terms to other people. They’ll hang their heads in shame and drop their tails between their legs while you discuss their mistakes with the neighbors. I’ve often said, if you can’t say something nice about your dog, don’t say anything at all. Believe me, they know! Some dogs get embarrassed. Watch their faces and you’ll see exactly what they’re picking up. They know what’s going on!
I once had a client who did nothing but complain about his dog. “Darn dog hair all over the place, darn walks on the coldest mornings of the winter, darn hard-to-open cans of dog food, darn this, darn that, darn dog.” It was a bad situation, to say the least. The client was stressed out, with a lot of problems—trouble on the job, trouble with his ex-wife, trouble paying child support. Although I could certainly sympathize with him, I’ve never felt compassionate toward people who take out their problems on their pets, even though too many owners do exactly that.
This dog was so used to being scolded and verbally abused that every time she saw her owner coming, her behavior, due to sheer fear, took a turn for the worse. Pepper didn’t mean to knock over the Parsons table and everything on it as she scrambled out of the way, but she couldn’t help trying to escape as fast as possible when she saw her owner. Then Pepper piddled on the living room rug out of sheer nervousness. Later that evening after waking from her nap, she also didn’t mean to stay, frozen with fear, in her owner’s favorite easy chair. Pepper knew he wanted to sit in it, but her frightened, sleepy brain couldn’t figure out what to do except sit there and growl as he tried to swat her out of the chair. That’s when I was called in.
You see, what happened was that these two had set up a Catch-22. My client’s berating behavior triggered Pepper’s incorrect conduct, and her poor responses caused my client to react in an even worse fashion. His growing dislike of Pepper was crystal clear to her, and the ongoing battle actually affected her psychological balance. This was compounded by the fact that both Pepper and her owner had recently experienced the emotional upheaval of the divorce. Pepper in particular missed her human Mom and brothers and sisters. She became increasingly skittish and unhappy. The more they went at it, the more out of control things became. Pepper became so accustomed to hearing “bad dog, stupid dog, darn dog!” that she believed it. Everything she did seemed wrong, so as a result she did nothing right. The owner kept yelling and Pepper became submissive, then defensive, then slowly aggressive as she could take no more.
Was Pepper a bad dog? No, but she was caught up in a bad situation. I am a firm believer that stress can be transmitted from one end of the leash to the other. Yes, Pepper’s owner was stressed out, but the fact remained that no one was nurturing Pepper or helping her develop a good self-image. Was Pepper in fact a good dog, a pretty dog, a nice dog? Yes she was—but nobody bothered to tell her so.
