Christa Walsh
Since it's only my parents and I at home, I decided to try to shape the behavior of my dog. We have a 3 1/2 year old shih tzu named Misty and she loves food, especially people food. Therefore, we have a real problem with her begging. We usually give in to her, so that is why she keeps begging, so I decided to try to make her stop begging by correcting her and disciplining her when she starts to beg.
I tried my experiment 2 times this weekend. Once at breakfast, which I eat at my kitchen table and once while I was eating a snack on the couch. At breakfast, when she starts to beg by whining or sneezing, I would make her sit, say NO and firmly give her a gentle hit on the top of her head. I stayed consistent and kept correcting her at the first sign of begging. Pretty soon, she was getting discouraged, so she just say there silent like she is supposed to. After she sat still with no begging for a few minutes I reinforced this behavior by giving her a little piece of food.
The next time I tried my experiment was much different because Misty tends to beg worse while she is on the couch because she can sit right next to us and see the food right in front of her. When she started to beg, I tried to same correction, but it wasn't working that well, so I decided I needed to separate her from the food. After placing her on the ground, I continued the correction and it worked much better. She even eventually became uninterested in the food a little.
There were two behaviors I reinforced in this experiment. Begging was punished by scolding and a head tap. Not begging was positively reinforced by rewarding her with a small piece of food.
The environment was very important because both time I was eating by myself. If my parents are eating at the same time as I am, Misty tends to beg a lot more because she gets frantic trying to beg from everyone at once. Probably if there had been other people in the room, she wouldn't have been as responsive to the consequences because she would've been distracted by other food. Other environmental factors were whether I was eating at the table or couch which I already said makes a difference, the fact that she was hungry, and the fact that everything else about the situation remained the same for except for the begging and consequences.
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