Why Do We Train a Dog to Sit and is it Really That Relevant?

sad French Bulldog

Learn a bit more about the “sit” command and if it's relevant for your pooch today. You'll be surprised at what you'll learn today! If you want to update your training techniques, we've got some information that'll provide you with a good place to start!

Training obedience behaviors to pet dogs as a means of controlling their behavior is an ethical decision. Whenever we train a behavior, it is important to determine how the behavior functions for the dog and whether asking for the behavior is appropriate in a given context, even if it is trained using positive methods. Before we teach a dog any behavior, we should determine the consequence of the behavior from the dog’s perspective.

Why does a dog sit? When does a dog sit?
Observing off-leash dog behavior tells us that dogs sit to observe, to rest, or to restrict access to their genitals. When non-fearful dogs greet, they stand. When dogs approach new objects, they walk over and stand to sniff them.

Dogs will choose to rise out of the sit position a great many times during their lifetime of training and social interactions. This means training sit as a duration entails suppressing a natural behavior—and that will take a lifetime of reinforcement.

Training sit for on-leash greetings
Allowing other dogs or people to approach a dog on leash is going to elicit some behavior—welcome or not—out of any dog. If an owner has trained their dog to sit during social interactions, this generally implies the dog was doing something unwanted and that a sit behavior was intended to stop the unwanted behavior from happening.

If an alternative behavior is going to be chosen and trained, we must consider the function of that behavior for the dog. In the case of the sit behavior, I personally find that it is not appropriate for social greetings. Most often dogs prefer to sniff people and dogs during greetings, and sniffing is physically easier while standing on all four legs.

What alternatives are there to teaching sit?
Asking the dog to choose between reinforcement their owner is offering, and filling their own emotional needs creates a conflict for the dog and risks devaluing the offered reinforcement. If moving out of a sit and standing instead is going to remove a reinforcement opportunity for the dog, but the dog must step backwards to relieve stress, the dog is not being offered a fair choice. Dogs should always have two reinforceable options: the choice to attend to the cue being given, and the choice to move away.

If a cue has been taught previously and the dog is offering another behavior in its place, consistently reinforcing the first behavior chosen by the dog will—perhaps counter-intuitively—reduce frustration and errors in the future.

The basic principle behind creating this “landing zone” is to recognize when more is being asked than the dog is capable of; this is a sign that the handler should wait a few moments before trying again. Handlers should recognize, that when the dog is throwing out behaviors, they are doing so in a chronologically backwards manner. They are trying things that worked in the past.

Does learning to sit teach a dog self-control?
Psychologists would define self-control as an animal’s ability to regulate urges, to juggle competing goals, and to sustain attention on tasks. Even though research suggests that impulsivity can be the result of a reduction of serotonin in the brain rather than of, say, body position, it is still often advised that training dogs to maintain stationary positions such as sitting will elicit “calm polite behavior” or improve “impulse control.”

There is no research to suggest that a cued sit behavior changes the dog’s emotional state to calm.

The first time I heard the idea that a dog could replace a sit behavior with a stand behavior during greetings, I became convinced that this was a more modern approach. Using resurgence and environmental control, owners can maintain a high rate of compliance with their dog’s training cues without putting them into conflict.

WOW! Who knew that so much more went into teaching your doggy to sit? It's pretty safe to assume that doggies automatically calm down when we command them to sit but it might not always be the case!

For more information on doggy training, visit IAABC Journal.



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