There was a question on Zhihu before, that is, when will you be shocked by the intelligence of dogs?

One of the upvoted answers was that one time I accidentally stepped on a husky, and it roared in pain. I felt sorry for it, and then I silently gave it a bunch of snacks as compensation.

Unexpectedly! From then on, every time it saw me passing by, it would stretch out its paws and put them at my feet for me to step on!

There is no sense of dissonance between this kind of behavior and Erha. However, this cannot be entirely attributed to the Husky’s impressive IQ. After all, most dogs cannot well understand what food rewards are actually rewarding them. What behavior.

Of course, in actual training, food rewards are still the most useful and unique reward method! All dogs in the world are one family! A family of foodies! Dogs will try their best to get the snacks in your hand. Meet your various needs~!

But in fact, most of the actions trained through food rewards are just mechanical stimulation. Dogs will only make actions to obtain food under this stimulation. In fact, they do not understand the meaning of the actions. The so-called dog gets smarter as it gets older, which is actually just an illusion. Dogs have just accumulated more life experience and learned to deal with various stimuli.

Returning to the food reward part, dogs are actually not very intelligent. Their understanding of food rewards is that a certain action I just performed satisfied a certain need of the owner, and then they received the reward. However, the problem is that they do not have enough IQ and life experience to judge which action triggers the reward mechanism.

So why do dog trainers generally ask for repeated training and reward actions multiple times? This is to help the dog screen out the wrong trigger points. Just like the husky above, if you insist on stepping on it once a day, then give it a food reward. , it will think that the way you play with it is to step on its feet. When one day you feel that this is too cruel and stop stepping on it, it will come to the conclusion "You don't step on me = you don't want to play with me." =You don’t give me a reward=You don’t love me anymore!” The logical chain, then sad, even angry~

The principle is actually the same as stopping a dog. You need to stop the dog immediately when it makes a mistake, rather than punishing it when you discover the consequences of its mistake. In many cases, the dog is confused, "Why did the owner bring me to the place where I peed and then give me a lecture? Is the owner stupid? No...the owner is right, that should be calling me Don’t come close to smell it after peeing in the future!” Then continue to pee next time... This is why many people say that they cannot teach dogs well.

Incorrect rewards and punishments are the most likely causes of bad behavior in dogs. Many times, dogs have difficulties.When it comes to understanding behavioral habits, many of them are actually rewards and punishments due to the owner's mistakes. A very classic case is that a Corgi suddenly became bored with the dog food he usually ate one day, and then went on a hunger strike to protest. The dog owner was very worried, so he gave him homemade meals and ordered new dog food. However, every time Corgi stopped eating after just two meals, the owner continued to give him homemade meals, and the problem of not eating was never solved.

In fact, the owner has entered into a misunderstanding. In fact, what dogs love to eat most is not dog food, but homemade meals. Just like a child, you feed him a meal every day. If he doesn't eat one day, you take him to McDonald's. If he continues to skip meals, you continue to take him to McDonald's. Over time, once he wants to eat McDonald's, he will Will refuse to eat. The same goes for dogs, so as long as you eliminate the connection between skipping meals and McDonald's, this bad behavior will no longer occur.