The impassable dog syndrome

When you live with an “impassable dog”, you often have the feeling that “it’s the dog or me!” You will have tried many different methods of training your dog without any lasting success and, over time, you will have come to the conclusion that your dog is simply impossible to train.

At that stage, there is very little hope left within you, which is why you are about to give up on your once so loved pet.

Yes, the love you feel will be greatly compromised by the anger and frustration pent up within you over time due to your dog’s lack of response.

You may even be thinking of giving it away …

“Uncompromising dogs” come in all shapes and sizes, as do the problems they are causing. Here is a simple non-inclusive list:

Dogs that:

• you just won’t learn to walk on a leash without pulling
• insist on running away from you by chasing anything in sight as soon as their lead breaks
• Open all your kitchen doors by helping themselves to whatever food is available
• barking at all hours of the day and sometimes throughout the night
• destroy cushions, slippers, furniture legs, etc.
• are completely uncontrollable when they meet other dogs

The “untrainable” challenges imposed on their owners can range from a single specific problem to many related or unrelated areas of discomfort.

The less pervasive the behavior problem, the more contained and less upset the owner tends to be.

At this point, you may rightly wonder if an “impassable dog” really can exist, given the intelligence of the canine species.

The answer is Yes and no.

Yes because there are dogs that have come to the conclusion that their human friends are not fit to be taken seriously because they are unreliable and impossible to understand.

No because when a dog does not receive proper training from his human counterpart, he or she will teach himself all things worth knowing. In addition, the dog learns from its owners not to do what they want.

We teach our dogs all the time and much of our teaching is done unconsciously, causing our dogs to behave in one way or another. The moment we realize this, we understand that there is in fact no impassable dog, but only our own way of mindlessly influencing our dog’s behavior.

Teaching a dog to behave in an unwanted, sometimes intolerable way and then blaming it is wrong. As loving owners, we want to put responsibility where it belongs: in our own hands. This is the prerequisite for successfully helping a dog change his ways and become the happy companion he should be.