Puppy Psychology

Clay had a conversation with one of his co-workers today about how her dog is scared of thunderstorms. Clay and I can totally relate to this because Maggie is a WUSS when the "thunder rolls." (ha ha) Clay's co-worker said that her vet advised her not to comfort the dog when the dog is scared because it conditions a behavior you as the owner don't want.

Ok I get this... I took Psych 101. Pavlov's dog. Bell rings. Dog drools. Food comes. Life for dog is good. Here the situation is more like thunder bangs. Dog goes to person. Person rubs ears. Life for dog is good. Person is now awake at 2am.

But then I got to thinking. Generally this behavior only bothers me at night. When an overnight storm rolls in and Maggie gets scared she wakes us up by shaking off which loudly jingles her collar. Baxter and Maggie have also developed this little trick to let us know when nature calls in the middle of the night. It's hard to know if it's "scared Maggie" or "gotta go outside" until after the behavior happens. Now granted I don't find either late night wake up call a pleasant experience so maybe I do need to remedy this.

So what do I do. When the dogs were just a few months old and still house training I would give anything for them to give me a sign when they needed to go outside. I spent a great many hours conditioning them to let me know when nature was calling. Heck we even spent money on puppy training classes! Furthermore, since we're in Oklahoma and tornadoes are rather frequent isn't it a good thing Maggie wakes us up when there is a storm. What if she were waking us up because the tornado siren scared her?

Consequently my dilemma. Do I risk undoing months of training by ignoring the dog's signals with the goal of conditioning "better" behavior? Or do I become a "bad" owner and let the dogs control me? As you can see I'm in quite the pickle.

The Culprit