What Dog Training Taught Me About Change

When I was a kid we had Chinese Sharpeis. Sharpeis are famous for being the "wrinkly" dogs on greeting cards and internet memes, but for anyone who's owned one, you know they can be temperamental and territorial.

Our dogs loved to run out the door as soon as someone came in the house. They'd run down the street and harrass the neighbors or anyone else they could see before one of us could round them up and get them home.

My dad finally bought an electric fence system for the house that included a wire and shock collars for the dogs. He wanted to change their behavior and he figured that getting a jolt of electricity to the throat anytime they got close to the wire would do the trick.

At first the dogs avoided the 5 foot range of the wire and the devices seemed to be working quite well to achive the desired result.

However at some point, the dogs realized they only received a jolt within 5 feet of the wire. They started sitting 10 feet away from the door, and as soon as they heard the handle they'd sprint through the room, clearing the 5 feet on each side of the wire within a fraction of a second, escaping the house with a sharp yelp and little damage.

One day, my dad came home and found the dogs sleeping right on the buried wire. Assuming the batteries were dead on the collar, he reached down to remove one of them and was greeted with a heavy jolt. It seems the dogs had gotten so used to the shocks, they were now just sleeping on the wire, receiveing a steady stream of electricity.

He took the collars off, removed the wire, and threw it all away.

The moral of the story? Behavior is hard to change. Pain works short term, but people learn how to minimize it first, and then eventually may just learn to live with it altogether.

How do you move past trying to change behavior and into changing someone's motivation? That is the real secret to change.