Hi, everyone. This is Bastian from TheK9Way. The topic of today’s video is why spoiling your dog has serious side effects. I want to give you a funny example of spoiling. A Client of mine a few years ago had a papillon. They ended up with a dog that would only eat if they made him jam and butter on toast cut in little stripes and hand fed him. Yeah, really cute but one extreme of spoiling behavior. And we tend to do that a lot. A lot of owners constantly fuss all over the dog, give it attention whenever it wants. Are there whenever the dog makes a little whimper. We justify the dog’s behavior. We worry about their behavior. And let them get away with lots and lots of things. More than we would let anyone else get away with. And that’s not really helpful because it usually goes along with hardly any constraints, no boundaries, no limits or very few of those.
What happens is it causes stress to the dog because if there are no boundaries, how far can I go? What can I do? How much can I dictate? And if I am in control in so many situations, what about all these other situations? So a lot of responsibility, which is our responsibility of looking after the dog, gets handed over to the dog. And then the dog wants to look after us, which again causes stress. Basically the dog takes on responsibility and deals with situations as the dog sees fit. And that’s just basically based on the temperament and the personality of the dog – how that turns out.
In the example with the Papillon, besides the picky eating, what started happening is it it would go for visitors and tell them off and try to deal with the situation. And the owners couldn’t manage the dog in that. That is what is happening often then if we spoil the dog a lot and if we give it a lot of love and attention at the wrong times, without the context of a balance relationship and without the context of boundaries and clarity around where it stands, that’s basically what’s happening. It’s the underlying problem or the root cause for most of the problem behaviors. Because if I can get what I want from you, then why should I listen to you in other situations? Particularly if the situation is important to me.
That’s where we drop the ball and that’s where we need to moderate and put the clarity of the relationship and the boundaries first, so that we can give all the love and affection which is great, which definitely has its place. But it needs to be balanced. This is an important part of having a relaxed and happy dog. So spoiling has side effects for sure. And I hope this creates some awareness and puts some light to some of the things that might be going on for you and your dog. I hope you found some valuable information in this little short video. Thanks a lot for you attention and talk soon.
Share this Post