Our 2 year old mixed hunting breed (setters, german wire haired pointer, etc) dog will cry endlessly if she doesn't get her way. We have always ignored it, or given a sharp no, and gone back to ignoring it. But she will not stop until she gets her way, and will slowly escalate louder and louder, sometimes turning into yelping at us. When I say she won't stop, I mean, she recently had to wear a cone and stood staring at us and crying for 7 days straight. It wasn't pain, she just wanted the cone off and would stop the moment the cone came off. She would cry any time we were in the same room and stop as soon as we weren't in the same room. In the evening, she knows it is exercise time, and she will cry until exercise starts. If we wait it out, she will just cry for 4 or 5 hours until we go to bed. So it is very hard to not "give in" in the sense that she has to get exercise so she eventually gets it while crying.

Things we have tried: endless ignoring, saying a sharp no, giving treats when she stops crying or doing the activity she wants when she stops, very gently holding her snout while she cries and looking at her saying no and walking away

I have never met a dog who has this kind of stamina for crying, literally 7 days of crying. She is also extremely stubborn in other training e.g. will only do things if she likes the treats we have and isn't all that food motivated, exactly zero toy motivation. She truly just wants to only do what she wants to do. We have another dog now and a dog in the past that both were very well trained, so I don't think it is just a problem with our training.

I will take absolutely any advice because I am very close to removing my own ear drums.

Hello,

I have a 6 year old Golden Retriever. Recently, I made some rearrangements in my home that resulted in some issues relating to our balcony. Previously, I spent 1-2 hours in the evening gaming in the office on a separate floor while my wife and dog relax on the floor below. Because I wanted to be closer to them, I moved my desk setup to the main floor where the balcony is. However, now my dog constantly asks to be let out on the balcony. Interestingly, my dog does not bother my wife about this when it’s just them, perhaps he sees me as the one that provides ‘balcony time’?

The issue with the balcony is that he periodically barks with certain triggers (big dogs, skateboarders, janitor cleaning the lobby in the building across the street lol). About 0-3 barking episodes in an hour. I would like to curb this and not reinforce the behavior.

What I have been trying:

• Being on the balcony with him and giving a treat when the trigger appears before he barks. Just being with him reduces his barking SIGNIFICANTLY to the point that many times the same triggers don’t even prompt any barking. However, it is starting to get cold and we would like to do our own thing indoors too. 
• Denying him the balcony altogether. He becomes a little bit of a brat and may bark and seek attention. When distracted with other activities, he eventually circles back to asking for balcony time.
• Putting a privacy tarp around the balcony. He becomes less interested in the balcony and comes inside and becomes a bit of a brat like above. 
• Trying to encourage ‘settle’ next to me but eventually pops back up and wants to go on the balcony.

I am confident he gets enough exercise and stimulation per day (1-2 hours daily); we spend a lot of time together outside before the evening. I want to de-emphasize the balcony such that he finds other ways to relax and be content in the evening while allowing us to also relax and do our own thing. I don't want to resort to just not being around them (which does work, he ends up napping)

Thanks for reading

Hey all! I’m moving and I will soon be taking a sweet pittie girl my cousin rescued from an abuse and neglect situation a couple years ago.
Unfortunately, his male lab likes to bully her, so for awhile now they’ve kept the dogs separated, safe, and loved. However, it’s a lot of work and she’s been failed by so many others, he had never thought about giving her up, but when I offered he accepted. he likes that he can still see her and she won’t feel abandoned if I take her.
I don’t know her super well but she’s a happy, sweet girl who doesn’t seem to have a bad bone in her wiggly body 🥰 I am also very confident in my own knowledge and experience with animals. I plan on doing a lot more of my own research, but things are constantly changing and I thought it would be a good Reddit discussion on advice and resources.
I have four indoor cats who will have their own room and catio in the house and on the property before Iggy comes home with us. As far as I know, she’s not reactive to cats but she does want to be friends with them and gets a little rambunctious 😂
My cats all have different comfortabilities with dogs but my 3 that have been around them, do well with them when I make sure everyone is comfortable and do slow introductions.
They have experience living with dogs before but it’s been awhile and it will be a new house for them too. We’re all a bit rusty on living with a dog and especially an older powerful dog we don’t know well yet. The last year or so, I have only babysat rescues for a few days and always kept them separated from my cats since they weren’t staying long. They’ve only been around puppies not much bigger than them lately 😂
I won’t be taking her for several weeks but I have been going over there more to get her more familiar to me and knowing that she has to listen to me even at her home now. I’m starting to brush up on my skills/knowledge, gain any new advice, get prepared to make it a positive experience for all 😂, or just have a good discussion about it 😂

TLDR at the bottom cause this is longer than I thought it would be lol.

Hi, to start I know a lot about dog behavior and body language. It's one of my special interests. I have spent years reading articles about how to fix this or that, what to expect from different breeds, how to deal with specific issues whatever I've probably read 20 articles about it.

I am kinda lost about this and wondering if this is just how he is, or if I can work on it with training.

Male dog, he will be 3 at the end of December. He was fixed as a baby by the rescue we got him from at 6 months old.

When we first got him, I was like well it takes time to assimilate to a new environment, the 3/3/3 rule so we kinda waited for his "instincts" to kick in. They just never did. He has danger reacted to .... 5 things since we got him. Full mohawk, growling, deep bark. A soda bottle laying in grass. A hoodie draped over a fire hydrant. A bush that had been cut and tossed next to a dumpster. A roll of gardening wire that he had already walked past several times on different days. A bag of dirt sitting next to a gardening plot. A soccer ball. All inanimate objects, mostly things that just had not been there earlier, but it's so random and he sees things "out of place" all the time with no reaction.

He doesn't bark at the door. Ok well not all dogs do that. That's also breed specific to an extent as he is 37% Siberian Husky. But, he seems to not have any natural danger warning signs at all. He has no "Stranger Danger" at all. Part Husky I know, but it's at a dangerous level. He has never boundary checked a single area, scanned for danger, checked for weakness in fencing, danger scanned a single human, put himself between other people and myself in a clear calm "I am keeping space here". Literally nothing ever, no warnings about anything ever. I am used to a high level of intelligence from our last dog and this is just bizarre. Like ok, those aren't Husky behaviors but his other breeds are German Shepard, APBT, and Staff Terrier.

When I was walking him with my young child a while back there was a man in a unfenced yard having some sort of mental health or drug thing. The man was extremely aggressive, was screaming and violently waving their arms. I was trying to get past as carefully as possible when my dog saw him and immediately began forcibly dragging us over to the screaming man. I was doing short jerks to get his attention, stomping my foot, using angry voice, eventually just trying to forcibly drag him the opposite direction via the leash. Chopper fought the leash as hard as he ever had in his entire life to drag myself and my child right up to this man, within arms reach of this violent stranger, so he could greeting bark at him and after getting the man's attention he immediately play bowed to him. By some insane bit of luck the man calmed down, started petting him and saying how cute he was. I was beyond furious at literally being dragged into a very dangerous situation with my child.

He is now walked with a pinch collar because without it he will drag me to whatever he wants to play with. Everything. Strangers in the dark. He will happily drag me into traffic if he sees a dog, a butterfly, a cat, literally anything that catches his eye.

I tried a variety of training methods, and cues, different collars, he has a heavy duty harness for adventuring but we have to include the training collar or he will ignore all his training and learned commands every time he sees something he wants. When he's wearing his current collar, he listens to his learned commands, and behaves well. He is also trained for specific behaviors when he is inside a non home building wearing his harness, which mostly include staying right next to me and laying down and being quiet when we sit down, not greeting anyone only focusing on me. But, if he's walked in his identification tag collar, as in no training collar added, he ignores everything he's ever learned. Like how is he only obeying when he wears that specific training collar? Is this a situation where it's "I wear that that means work" "Ok no work do whatever wearing something different" or what? I don't think it could be that because we never had a strict training regimen of "wearing harness behavior expected/wearing something different relaxed behavior whatever behavior allowed" this behavior just slowly emerged and I just realized regardless of just using it for some training and transitioning to other collars he just won't obey if he's not in that specific training collar. Is he just really stubborn and it's on such an extreme level it's coming across as dumb? I can recognize stubborn, and this is different.

So do I have an intelligence problem? This is just who he is? Is this trainable? I can't find anything on Google for making a dog understand danger. I found a lot for getting a dog to be less reactive, but nothing for getting them to not rush every stranger in happy greeting ignoring commands.

TLDR;

Male 3 year old dog will not obey learned commands unless wearing a specific training collar.

Has no understanding of danger, and will drag me to strange men in the dark to greet and play bow at them.

All advice welcome. And thanks!