E8: When you have to correct your dog

Judge is stopped dead by a fart noise. Bowie begins his tiptoe across the room before anyone has said anything. Makenzie sits down on the pavement and refuses to move until she is asked rather than told. Correcting your dog looks very different depending on the dog, and none of it works quite the way you expect.In this episode, Annika, Bruce, and Ben sit with the moment of correction itself: not training methods or what is right or wrong, but the moment as it actually happens, what the dog does in it, and what we tell ourselves about it afterward.Bruce uses a fart noise. It stops Judge immediately, every time, and Bruce is completely unbothered about this. But Judge also once chewed a hole in the couch, covered the stuffing with his paw when Tatiana walked in, and scooted further over when she noticed something was wrong. She did not yet know anything had happened. He was not responding to her displeasure. He was getting ahead of it.Research on the guilty look, that particular combination of soft eyes and lowered head that makes you certain the lesson has landed, suggests it reflects the dog reading our emotional state rather than reflecting on what they did. Bruce disagrees, and he has the video. Both positions are in the room for the rest of the episode.The conversation moves through Bowie's tiptoe, Kenzie's thirty-second standoff on the pavement, the behaviours that get corrected over and over and keep coming back, what repair after a correction looks like, and who it is actually for. It also moves through a question that kept arriving the more they talked: what is the moment of correction actually doing, and what matters more than the correction itself?This is not advice about how to correct your dog. It is a conversation about what that moment exposes, in our dogs and in us.Find us on Instagram @pawplexitypodcast, on our webpage at www.pawplexity.dog, or wherever you listen.