Hi- help here from a NY native who knows Brooklyn! Lol.
Couple of questions –
Answering honestly – how good is your dog’s understanding of the commands you are using? Did you teach a “stop”? What does it mean to them? Does it mean “freeze?” Does it mean “wait for me”? What exactly are you asking your dogs to do with their bodies when you say that word?
Next – does each dog respond to this command when they are alone (separated from the other?)? Can each one respond to the command on the first try (you don’t want to have to repeat a command more than once. If your dog isn’t responding the first time you ask for something – he hasn’t’ learned the command). Do you need your treats to get each dog to respond?
Next – have you trained this command in different locations? Your dogs may respond to “stop” in the house but have no clue what is being asked when you are outdoors. Dogs are very context oriented and don’t generalize well. That’s’ why a very “housebroken” dog may have accidents when staying in someone else’s home. Just because your dogs will “stop” in the house, does not mean they will also “stop” in the street unless you have taught them (from the beginning, baby steps) the stop command outside as well.
The reason I’m asking all these questions, as you may have already gotten the implication, is the “fact pattern” you’ve given us have two issues – not just one. Yes, there’s the “dog A learning bad stuff from dog b” but there’s also the question of how well does each dog, individually, know what is being asked of it? You need to first isolate whether your dogs will respond to you outdoors – each alone before you can address the problem of one dog not listening because of the other.
As far as training two dogs are concerned, the advice you are getting about isolated them at first in training sessions is a good one. Ultimatly, though, you will need to get them working together. One idea is to use different commands for each dog (and if you are going to use any punishments such as a “No!” or any release commands such as “free” or “OK” you need to differentiate that as well. In fact, I even sell a clicker with different tones because people in multiple dog households often find that it becomes necessary to assign different tones to each dog to avoid “clicker confusion,”) |