Ep279 - Why you can't lie to your dog [Q&A]

So the first question here that we've got is, is Nathan from Canberra.

He asked, my dog seems to trust my wife more than me, even though I'm the one who feeds him most of the time.

What are dogs actually looking at when they decide who to follow and trust? So there's a little bit to unpack here and I'll start off by saying the first thing, feeding a dog on its own doesn't build trust.

Dogs aren't, even though they can be simplistic if we're comparing them to humans, but they are very complex in their own way and just giving them food alone doesn't make them like you because a relationship has many different variables at play.

And trust, I've got the definition of trustee, is a belief that you are reliable, emotionally safe, and have the other's best interests at heart.

So, again, I don't know Nathan, so I haven't met him and his dog, and How do you know that your dog doesn't trust you? Like on what metric are we talking here? Because some things that I wrote here were like signs of no trust would be fear and avoidance, I'm assuming.

I'm going to also assume that when you're asking your dog to go through a tough situation that they don't choose to come to you or... you're asking them to come over to you for a pat and they don't, or maybe they do come over to you for a pat, you start patting them and then they start showing some avoidance behavior, or maybe they get defensive, or maybe you go pick them up and they want to bite you.

So I don't have heaps of context here.

And by the time I asked Nathan, I haven't heard back from him yet.

So hopefully you can tune into this and I can go into a bit of detail and maybe we can have a chat in a lot more detail.

But Things that you want to think about when it comes to building trust, and this goes for people as well.

And if you go back to that definition here, well, you want to be reliable.

So that's number one.

And what does reliable mean to a dog? Would be that if the dog needs you or the dog is wanting something to be happening in their life, that you're there to provide for them.

Feeding is one of them.

So yeah, you are reliable for feeding, and that's true.

But if that's the only thing that we do and if that's the only thing that he mentions, hey, I feed him or I feed the dog, I'm not sure if it's male or female, I feed the dog and the dog doesn't trust me, like what's going on? And that's like a moment of the day that isn't very long.

You put some food in the bowl, you say sit, you put the food down, you say okay, the dog goes and eats it.

What I'd probably do with that food is going, hey, Tell the missus, I'm going to be handling the food for the next month and we're going to do a lot of fun stuff with it.

We could go into the yard, start working on some basic luring, go through some of your commands.

I would say, and you want the dog train to say this, do you have a reliable down stay? Can your dog hold a down stay for a minute while you walk away? When you call them to come, do they come to you? The recall is probably one of the big ones.

Because if a dog's not trusting you, I'm assuming the dog's trying to get away from you.

And recall is all about togetherness, being close.

Call them to come, they come closer, you start feeding them their dinner.

Start doing this in the front yard.