Everyone struggles with nuisance behaviors sometimes, especially if you’re living with young or adolescent dogs. Nuisance behaviors encompass anything from counter surfing to jumping on people to digging in the yard. For our purposes, nuisance behaviors don’t include behaviors that stem from phobias, fears, or any other strong negative feeling.

Although there are a huge variety of nuisance behaviors that we might experience, resolving any given undesirable behavior follows a very similar blueprint. Most problem behaviors are a manifestation of natural canine behaviors that crop up at inopportune times. Dogs need to express natural behaviors like sniffing, digging, foraging, shredding, chasing, barking, running, wrestling, jumping, and more. But that doesn’t mean their expression has to interfere with our need for a peaceful, enjoyable life!

Step Zero: Management & Lifestyle Check

Practice makes perfect! But in this case, even more importantly – practice makes permanent. When at all possible, prevent your dog from practicing any behavior or feeling you don’t want to see more of. Management looks different for every situation – you can check out our article on management for more information. If management isn’t possible – and when management fails – interrupt the behavior anytime you see it happen in front of you. Remember to interrupt with kindness – we don’t want our dogs to think that their behavior is a bad idea when we are around, because they’ll just practice it even more when you’re not there to interrupt them!

This is an excellent time to take a quick look at your dog’s daily routine and make sure their breed- and age-appropriate needs are being fulfilled. An adolescent or young adult Northern breed dog is not likely to be satisfied with a 10 minute walk once a day. Similarly, a terrier that rarely has the opportunity to chase and bark at small, fast moving things is not likely to be calm and quiet for the duration of a standard workday (especially if they can see or hear things outside!)

Step One: Identify Your Motivator

Before we can do anything effective to change our problem behavior, we need to know why our dog is doing this behavior. This is the most critical step!! To determine the motivator (or “reinforcer”) at play, look at the antecedents and consequences of your dog’s actions.

• Dogs that counter surf might be looking for food, interesting objects, or attention.
• Dogs that jump on guests might be looking for energetic social interaction or attention.
• Dogs that dig in the yard, chew, or sniff frequently are often expressing natural and instinctual behaviors.
• Dogs that pull on the leash are often trying to explore their environment, move faster and cover more ground, or interact with a specific interesting object.
• Dogs that bark might be looking for attention, announcing a need to go potty, or alerting to intruders, other dogs, squirrels, or novel people.

Remember – it doesn’t matter if most dogs do ABC behavior for XYZ reason. What matters to us is what matters to your dog. Your dog might bark because he wants to go explore, and pull on the leash because one time he found a chicken nugget while pulling on the leash and now he thinks it might summon another. Think about your dog’s behavior – when did it start? Does anything make it worse or better?

Step Two: Determine An Acceptable Compromise

If nothing else, dogs are efficient. The simplest way to eradicate a behavior is to give our dogs a more efficient route to get what they want. Chances are they’re also feeling a bit frustrated with the effectiveness of their attempts at getting what they want.

The key word here is compromise. For this to work, your compromise has to fulfill your dog’s desire for their motivator and your desire to avoid problems.

• Dogs who counter surf to search for food might feel a need to forage and search for food.
  • Satisfy this by playing foraging scent games with them in appropriate times and places – like searching for their dinner that you have hidden in the backyard.
• Dogs who bark for attention may have higher social needs than anticipated.
  • Satisfy their social needs by spending increased quality one on one time with them via walks, play sessions, or training sessions.
• Dogs that chew inappropriate objects may have a preference for the texture, size, flavor, or scent of those objects.
  • Satisfy this by giving them safe alternatives that closely match the objects they naturally choose.
• Dogs that dig in the yard may have higher foraging and digging needs than anticipated.
  • Satisfy their digging needs by using enrichment items that engage their paws, like rolled up towels with treats inside.
  • You can also give them a designated digging area in the yard that you don’t mind them wreaking havoc on.

Everyone’s compromise will look different, just like everyone’s lifestyle looks different! What you find easy and sustainable might be completely out of the question for another household, and vice versa. Our household struggled with persistent digging. Between our hound mix, German Shepherd, Malinois, and Lab, we have high digging needs! For us, giving our dogs an alternative “digging zone” was an easy and sustainable solution. Since giving them this outlet last year, we haven’t had any errant holes in the yard or innocent plants lost. The photo for this article is their most impressive excavation effort. Here’s a video of our Malinois enjoying the fruits of her labor – a cool, shady den on a hot summer day!

Step Three: Reduce Management & Maintenance

Once you’ve found a compromise that works for you and your dog, you can start to ease up on management. As your dog is able to stay successful and doesn’t go back to their old tricks, continue reducing how much management you are doing.

If you see your old problem behaviors start to crop up again – increase management and take a look at your lifestyle and routine. Has anything changed? Is your compromise still effective, or is it not working for you or your dog?

Still have questions? I’m here to help! Shoot me an email and I would be happy to help guide you through this process for your specific situation.