Does Your Dog Love You? Let's Talk Relationships #80
Shaped by Dog with Susan Garrett
DogsThat
4.8 • 679 Ratings
🗓️ 28 April 2021
⏱️ 16 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Visit us at shapedbydog.com
Many dog owners wonder, "does my dog love me?". We'd all like to think our dogs love us, but how can we tell? It could all come down to the relationship you have with your dog and how that impacts the way you train your dog and communicate. There are three different sorts of relationships, and our interactions might have elements of each. It's not dissimilar to the relationship a child has with a parent or relationships in the workplace. We can demand, dominate, and control, or bribe, cajole and cater, or give choices and reinforcement that grow trust and autonomy.
In the episode you'll hear:
• What happens with blame when rules are broken and why to check our ego.
• Why control creates resistance, opposition, rebellion and can result in sneaky behavior.
• About what really happens if you just want your dog to be a dog.
• What a transactional relationship based on bribing and luring does to our dogs.
• The ways your relationship with your dog can be exhausting for you.
• How each type of relationship can impact something like training a retrieve.
• Why we aim for autonomy in relationships with our dogs and what it means.
• About choice based training and how that creates a dopamine release.
• How our dog training decisions can create trust.
• Why I ask my dogs questions and what the answers tell me.
• How our relationships can help us all flourish, including our dogs.
Resources:
• Podcast Episode 34: Time Outs for Dogs: Does Your Dog Need One? - https://dogsthat.com/podcast/34/
• Podcast Episode 44: Using Coincidences and Positive Associations in Dog Training - https://dogsthat.com/podcast/44/
• Podcast Episode 78: How to Train a Rescue Dog with Behavior Problems - https://dogsthat.com/podcast/78/
• Podcast Episode 21: The 5 Critical Dog Training Layers for Confidence with Anything - https://dogsthat.com/podcast/21/
• Watch this Episode of Shaped by Dog on YouTube - https://youtu.be/w-XGE_UYACw
Study References:
• Survey of the use and outcome of confrontational and non-confrontational training methods in client-owned dogs showing undesired behaviors - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0168159108003717
• Does training method matter? Evidence for the negative impact of aversive-based methods on companion dog welfare - https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0225023
• Bad dog? Think twice before yelling, experts say - https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/11/bad-dog-think-twice-yelling-experts-say
• Dogs' Sociability, Owners' Neuroticism and Attachment Style to Pets as Predictors of Dog Aggression - https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/10/2/315/htm
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Believe it or not, one of the most Google questions about dogs is, how do we get my dog to |
| 0:16.4 | love me? And that brings me to mind the number of people who write things on some of my posts like, |
| 0:23.3 | why do we have to train dogs anyway? Why can't we just let dogs be dogs? It's like one end and the |
| 0:28.6 | other. And believe it or not, both of those questions come down to the same thing. It's the |
| 0:35.4 | relationship you have with your dog. Hi, I'm Susan Garrett. |
| 0:38.9 | Welcome to Shape by Dog. If you're watching this on YouTube and you're getting value from |
| 0:43.2 | the information that I'm sharing, please go ahead and hit the like button now and be sure |
| 0:47.5 | to subscribe to this channel. So, you're going to be notified when a new podcast gets released. I look at the relationships that we have |
| 0:57.6 | with our dogs and they aren't dissimilar to the relationship that a child has with a parent. |
| 1:03.8 | And although I have no children of my own, I have a lot of nieces and nephews, and believe |
| 1:10.1 | it or not, I was a child once with a parent. |
| 1:13.3 | So I understand what that relationship looks like from one point of view anyway, for sure. |
| 1:19.3 | It's also similar to the relationship a business owner would have with their team. |
| 1:24.6 | And I've categorized it into three different types of relationships. |
| 1:29.5 | And truthfully, they may be parts of one or the other. I like to think mine are predominantly |
| 1:35.7 | the last. But the three types of relationships would be one that you demand, |
| 1:41.3 | dominate, and control, or you bribe, cajole, and cater to. |
| 1:46.2 | Or the third would be that you give choices, reinforcement, and you grow towards autonomy. |
| 1:52.6 | All right? |
| 1:52.9 | So, three very different groups of words to describe three very different relationships. |
| 1:58.1 | And I believe they go across all three of those different relationships. |
| 2:02.0 | Dog and their owner, parent and child, business owner and their team. And some people would |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from DogsThat, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of DogsThat and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.