Hi and thanks for taking a look. I am the proud owner of a 9 week old Lab Puppy that has been home for 5 days now. Things are going well all things considered. Of course some sleepless nights and biting, etc. are taking place but all normal and well within our expectations. This is our 3rd lab but been a while since I had a puppy! I had a question about a can of pennies or a water spray bottle to help stop some behaviors. I am mainly talking about chewing on things like the bottom of chairs or dangling cords, strings, etc. Is that still a good tool to train or viewed as a "fear tactic" that should be avoided? I would love any suggestions as to what has been successful for you in training your puppy. Tanks in advance for any help!
Hi and welcome to the forum! We don’t recommend the use of aversives, punishment based training, on the forum. You can find the forum guidelines here: https://thelabradorforum.com/threads/forum-guidelines-2019.24191/ Happily, however there are lots of other options for helping to stop your puppy chewing. You can find details of these methods here: https://www.thelabradorsite.com/how-to-stop-a-dog-from-chewing/ and here: https://thehappypuppysite.com/how-to-stop-a-dog-from-chewing/ Let us know how you get along!
If you post a question on a pasific behaviour then the trainers on here are willing to help you with reinforcement training methods. Dogs learn through kindness and lots of treats for good behaviour.
It's not just that it's a fear tactic, it's also that it doesn't work. It won't teach the puppy what you want to teach them. Why? Because unless you are 100% of your time standing by every power cord or string or bottom of a chair in your entire house, you will not be giving a consistent response to the chewing of these items. The puppy will have no way of being able to work out why you are suddenly doing frightening things. You will just become an unpredictable and scary thing to the puppy - for no apparent reason, you turn up and make loud noises. Imagine being locked in a room with nothing else to do. In this room, there are some books and magazines and water on a table, plus a TV. Sometimes you go turn on the TV, drink the water or read a book - and all is great and you enjoy doing that. And sometimes you turn on the TV, drink the water or read the book - and some person comes in and throws something frightening at you. Why is this happening? It can't be the TV, water or book - because many times you can enjoy these things without anything happening. It must just be totally random. So, totally randomly, some frightening and unpredictable person comes in and basically intimidates and scares you... And then there's the risk of fear generalising. Unless you want your puppy to become scared of all similar noises, it's not wise to encourage fear of rattleboxes. For example, the sound is a metallic noise. Dogs can easily generalise to be scared of metal crate noises, of metal cookie sheets, metal water bowls - and so on. And then it just becomes 'any sudden, loud and unexpected noise' and you have a dog afraid of trucks beeping and reversing - and so on. Fear generalises like wildfire, because in the wild, it is adaptive to learn what is a threat and to avoid it. That leads to longevity. During the socialisation period, the whole POINT of it, is to teach the puppy that the world is a SAFE place, where the puppy has CONTROL. The puppy is not going to learn that the world is a safe place, if periodically the puppy's own caregivers (who should be attachment figures - and so, the main source of safety to the puppy) do scary and unpredictable things to the pup...
