Stopping Gargabe Collection & Countersurfing (no punishment allowed)

I've had German Shepherds since 1986, Dena and Keefer are my 3rd and 4th. Up until I got Keefer 2 years ago I'd never had such a food driven dog before, never even known one. The upside is that he's really easy to motivate, and consequently, very easy to train. "Will work for food" may as well be tattooed on his forehead. It's hard to train a dog when you can't figure out what motivates him. With a dog like Keefer it's a snap - food, food, and more food!

I've never believed that "meeting the dogs needs" will solve all behavioral problems. Sure, a tired dog is less likely to have the energy to misbehave, and a starving dog will be more motivated to steal food. But a lot of what humans call "misbehavior" in dogs is perfectly normal dog behavior that WILL NOT go away unless you teach the dog to not do it.  You can exercise your puppy into a coma and he'll still think the rug is fine place to pee.

Cassidys Mom

The upside is that he's really easy to motivate, and consequently, very easy to train. "Will work for food" may as well be tattooed on his forehead. It's hard to train a dog when you can't figure out what motivates him. With a dog like Keefer it's a snap - food, food, and more food!

I have said many times on this forum that I will take advantage of a dog whose condition or state is not normal for the sake of training.  I will not use food as a motivator on an emaciated dog nor would I do the same if food was part of an obsession.   Only when the dog is clear of the basic survival instinct or the obsession addressed, would I use food to train.

Look, I have had over 30 foster dogs come to home with all sorts of issues and food is always on the top of the list.  I provide the dogs a good home structure, schedules, a stable pack, shelter, good food, and human companionship.  I don't think I have been lucky but it is the environment and security I provide that brings the dog into a stable state.

I have 3 residence dogs and presently are fostering 3.  Meal time, twice a day is huge social event at my home.  I try and connect everything with a social event that all the dogs can participate in.  All dogs eat separately but without barriers.  The newest dog that I got this past weekend has/had food aggression issues with other dogs so she is babygated but all dogs can see each other.  Each dog has a different meal or a variation of one of the meals.  One Dane get close to 3lbs of cooked hamburger and beef stew meat, a can veggies, half can mushrooms, a can of tomotoes, rice, vitamins and some herbs.  Another Dane that eats 6 inches aways gets one and a half cups Pedigree dry and a half can of Hill's ID.  The last Dane, about 4 feet away gets just 2 and half cups of Pedigree dry.  The lab foster who is about 6 feet away, gets 1 cup of dry Canidae a half can of Canidae.  The foster hound eats in the ungated kitchen has the same as the foster lab.  The new foster, which is on 4 different medications, gets a cup of ? (I forget, it begins with an A) and some of the Danes's stew.  Treats, most of the time its milkbone, are dispensed freely when the dogs go outside and when the dogs come in.  All dogs, even the new one, waits patiently for me to hand them their treat.  The open box of treats are then left on the kitchen counter

So why aren't all the other dogs going bonkers for the meal with the cooked beef and smells so good and countersurfing for the treats?

Our dogs don't countersurf for milk bones either. Leave a roast chicken up there and I wouldn't like to lay money on it staying for long.  DPU, you seem to be implying that the folks here with "foody" dogs dont:

DPU

...provide the dogs a good home structure, schedules, a stable pack, shelter, good food, and human companionship

That hardly seems fair.

Direct response to the OP:  You could train a dog to do X whenever they get too close to the bin, X being something incompatible with bin raiding, a "sit" or a "down" on a "turn around".  You could also just reward the dog for not raiding the bin whenever he is in that room and gradually leave it out longer with gradually less management and supervision as the dog becomes more "trustworthy"... remembering to still put it away if theres something stinky or meaty thrown in there in the early stages.  But I really dont see the point.  Who wants the rubbish bin out in plain view anyway for the sake of it?  Pick your battles I say.  If you can put it away, put it away and spend the time with your dog doing something else more enjoyable.  This is not a contest

Chuffy

Our dogs don't countersurf for milk bones either. Leave a roast chicken up there and I wouldn't like to lay money on it staying for long. 

How long does the roast chicken stay on the counter?  How much?  And how do we verify?

I have not tested that theory, due to the risk to the dogs if cooked chicken bones are ingested.  If its a choice between "verifying" and keeping my dogs safe and healthy, I'll go with the latter if its all the same to you.  My dogs are here for me to enjoy, not carry out meaningless experiments on.

Chuffy

Who wants the rubbish bin out in plain view anyway for the sake of it?  Pick your battles I say.  If you can put it away, put it away and spend the time with your dog doing something else more enjoyable.  This is not a contest

Exactly, and well said!

Chuffy

I have not tested that theory, due to the risk to the dogs if cooked chicken bones are ingested.  If its a choice between "verifying" and keeping my dogs safe and healthy, I'll go with the latter if its all the same to you.  My dogs are here for me to enjoy, not carry out meaningless experiments on.

This why I would win the bet because I trust the dogs in my house and more importantly, they trust me.  Plus, I stated in my post one of my dogs get cooked beef in her food bowl and all the other dogs don't go after her bowl.  All my dogs enjoy food but more importantly they enjoy me and yes, I enjoy them too.

I hope you're not suggesting that Chuffy does not trust her dogs.  No one but her is entitled to make that call.

I trust my dog...doesn't mean I am willing to lead him down the path of temptation for the sake of it. 
 

Benedict

I hope you're not suggesting that Chuffy does not trust her dogs.  No one but her is entitled to make that call.

I trust my dog...doesn't mean I am willing to lead him down the path of temptation for the sake of it. 
 

I am always referencing how it is in my house, proudly as a matter of fact.  You could have also gone the other way with Chuffy suggesting the bet, that she was implying that there is no trust in my house.  Just a different way of looking at things.

Fullfilling the dog's needs and my relationship with the dogs is core to my success in rehabbing fosters.  Food is a big issue in a multi-dog house and for me I have to deal with it every so often with a new foster.  For me, I don't see a difference between leaving a roast chicken on the kitchen counter and giving the dog free reign of the house when I am not home.  As I said my dogs enjoy food but food is not the most valued reward that they want. 

I thought the bet was I leave an unattended roast chicken on my counter and then see if any of the dogs would go after it.

I have been reading this crap, and I have to say that I rescue as DPU rescues.......the idea that not every rescue dog is food motivated is insane.......just as much as dogs at home........so, really, for every dog owner on this thread.....do you really feel you satisfied your dogs' needs.....may that be rescues or home raised.....I know of German Shepherd breeders who will starve their dogs for a certain look......I can't subscribe to that....but, that doesn't mean it does NOT happen.........

You know, DPU, you have this way of making these sorts of things always in to some kind of contest and it is really really off-putting. I'm very glad that you have such success with fosters and you do a great thing for them, but you're implying that you have some magical relationship with your dogs that none of the rest of us have, and I'm sorry, there is no way for you to know what kind of relationship we have with our dogs based on the extraneous facts of who's dogs do and do not like food and who's dogs do and do not counter-surf if not trained/managed to not do it.

You come off like you feel you're the only person on the planet who has a great relationship with their dogs (and in previous threads the only person on earth who does things to help dogs). I'm sure I'm going to red-inked but I feel it needs to be said:  What you are implying with your posts in this thread is really kind of offensive and petty and arrogant.

And for the record, just in case you didn't read carefully, while I do have one dog (a dog who I did not raise from a puppy, a dog I adopted as an adult pre-loaded with his software) who is pretty geeked about food, neither he nor any dog in my house counter-surfs or raids the garbage despite the fact that the garbage can is out and our counters frequently have food on them, but I'm also not going to judge anyone based on the habits their dogs arrive in their houses with before any training or management is done.

You're trying to figure out why some dogs are so into food that they'd do some of the wacky things our dogs do in order to get food. Well, let's get out Occam's Razor and look at the most likely explanation: an instinct to seek out and eat food has major evolutionary advantages, especially for a species that is an opportunistic scavenger, as dogs are.  Human beings suffer from this same set of instincts--we are pre-programmed to seek out and enjoy the taste of foods that are fatty, sweet and salty because until the past couple hundred years these foods were rare yet extremely important to our survival. Now that fat, sugar and salt are plentiful in our lives, our evolutionary programming to enjoy the taste of these foods leads to obesity and other health problems. Back when dogs were domesticated in only the loosest sense of the term, it was highly advantageous for them to basically take whatever they could get, eat as much as they could when they did find food, because it was never completely clear where their next meal would come from. Individuals who possessed this instinct were better able to pass on their genes. I actually think it's kind of weird when you find dogs who are really picky or who don't seem to have a drive to eat enough to stay healthy because that completely goes against evolution and if those dogs were living on their own without our help, they would die during the first cold winter. But there's a tremendous amount of genetic diversity in domestic dogs today, so you'll get things popping up that are both evolutionary highly maladaptive as well as traits that are throwbacks to traits more common in early feral dogs. You can't really say that all dogs naturally are one way or another way, since we've been selectively breeding for a lot of genetic diversity for several hundred years. But a species that self-domesticated by feeding off of human garbage piles is probably going to yield a few individuals who don't see much difference between the village dump of yore and your kitchen trash can every now and again.

That seems to be a much more likely explanation for the range of feeding behaviors seen in domestic dogs. 

DPU

I will not use food as a motivator on an emaciated dog nor would I do the same if food was part of an obsession.  Only when the dog is clear of the basic survival instinct or the obsession addressed, would I use food to train.

Really? My training philosophy is to use whatever floats that particular dog's boat as a training tool. Yep, I'll exploit it, no problem whatsoever. I can see your reluctance with a rescue dog, but I've raised Dena and Keefer from puppyhood, I got them both at 9 weeks old. I know hat Keef was never denied food or went wanting. He just came hardwired to be into food, just like some humans. Dena is the same way with balls - she was a natural retriever from the time she could get a ball in her mouth. Her ball obsession will no more be "addressed" than his food obsession will be. Why wouldn't I use those motivators as training tools? 

 Without rocking the boat too much (I hope), I'm going to stick up for DPU because I think I can see where he's coming from. Definitely fulfilling an animal's natural needs is a huge step towards a well-behaved animal, and more specifically, a huge step away from poking around in places you don't want them to. With the rabbits, I have certainly been in that place where I have a little part of my mind constantly aware of where the rabbits are and what they're doing. Noises of rabbit destruction or even suspicious silences get me out of my chair to check it out quicksmart, especially when living in a rental house. I've had a fair bit of success getting Kit's destructiveness right down by making sure he gets out and about a lot and always has something he's allowed to chew. Cardboard and seagrass mats are always available to him, and it didn't take much encouragement from me at all to get him to always pick those things to chew on rather than my clothes, electric wires, carpet, or my housemate's piano. It's very difficult to train a hare, but I can establish good habits, and I don't need concepts of ownership or obvious aversives to do it. I did use a very mild form of punishment, but it wasn't enough to make Kit stressed at all, and he stresses out really easily. Of course, every animal is different and my bag of mischief in rabbit form, Kat, took my efforts to establish good habits as a direct challenge and assumed anything I didn't want her near was probably something really good. She was a brainy rabbit, though, and I don't think she liked me very much. She died at 6 months old, so we didn't get very far with our relationship or training/conditioning. My current rabbit is supremely happy with a hutch full of newspaper and has no desire to destroy anything as long as she's got her own things to arrange. And of course, rabbits are creatures of habit, and once you've established a habit in a rabbit, it becomes quite set and they don't often try anything new.

On the issue of rewarding a dog with their obsessions, I don't personally do it. I don't like obssessiveness in dogs and would rather not encourage it. My dog is obssessed with food and if I try to train her with it, I quickly lose patience as she acts the goose and runs madly through every command she knows hoping to hit on the one that will get her the food. That's her, though. Pyry is obssessed with small animals and hunting, but not much else. In certain circumstances, I would reward him with a long look at one of my rabbits, a clump of feathers, or maybe just a toy that looks very much like a bird or rodent. I only bring out the big guns like that if I'm competing with something tremendously interesting to the dog.

Lastly, although my dog is thoroughly obssessed with food, I could leave a bag of kibble out in her reach and she would never touch it. As it turned out, that's because she doesn't like kibble very much. She adores her raw meat and veg, though, and would go through fire to steal a bite from someone else's dish. She thinks she is always hungry, which means she gets overweight quite easily if we don't watch carefully what she's eating. That's not healthy. If I left her raw meat and veg out, she'd eat until she couldn't stand up anymore. And yet, the kibble was always safe! I'm not accusing you, DPU, of feeding your dogs crap or something, but is it possible they are not actually that fond of kibble? Also, Jill only ever eats just enough to keep her going regardless of how much is available. She's more interested in play. She'll leave her raw meat and veg to Penny for a game of fetch. Could it be your dogs just aren't that food motivated, like Jill?

Back on topic.... I don't see why you can't put the bin out of the way of the dog, really. Management is a good way to establish good habits, and it's all so passive. I like passive sometimes.
 

corvus

Without rocking the boat too much (I hope), I'm going to stick up for DPU because I think I can see where he's coming from. Definitely fulfilling an animal's natural needs is a huge step towards a well-behaved animal, and more specifically, a huge step away from poking around in places you don't want them to.

I don't want to rock the boat either. Lord knows this thing's about to tip over and spill us all out into the drink. But I agree, too. And I'm sorry if that's off-putting to some. I don't mean it to be. And I don't think DPU is meaning to be  accusatory, he's trying to make a point in the way that he makes points. And he's trying to find out something. If I were curious about it; if I still cared, I might be asking the same questions. But I have come not to care. I know what's going on in my house and I don't need to compare or be right or make others wrong. (anymore)

corvus

On the issue of rewarding a dog with their obsessions, I don't personally do it. I don't like obssessiveness in dogs and would rather not encourage it.

Ditto. I used to be thankful that I had food-motivated dogs. Until I got one that isn't. I had to figure a way to deal with her without food and it's so much more rewarding to me! And I believe to all my dogs. It's about the relationship. Not about giving them what they're obsessed about in order to get what I want.

So, I'm not going to get any deeper here, I just wanted to put in my $.02 worth. And to some, I'm sure it's worthless, but that's cool with me. I know how much it's worth.