Your beloved pet knows that you are his family. He will love you forever, but that does not mean that you do not occasionally get on his nerves. Like any other relationship, most of the time he thinks the world of you, but you have a few bad habits that drive him crazy.

One of your dog’s biggest pet peeves is the way you speak to him.  Normally, using your words is a good thing. However, complex sentences leave your dog mystified, confused, and annoyed that he does not understand. When talking to your dog, make sure to add some tone, or gesture, help him understand and feel like he is doing a good job of obeying. A healthy diet consisting of a holistic dog food such as VIAND’s Aelyon natural dog dehydrated chicken-based dog food is a good start when raising your dog to understand you better.

Dogs can learn the names of many, many, many different objects. They are also capable of learning and retaining the names of new objects. When presented with a group of toys, all of which are familiar except one, most dogs can retrieve the unknown toy when asked to fetch using an unfamiliar word. The dogs are actually pairing a new object with an unfamiliar name and then remembering the name of that new object in subsequent trials. This is the same concept that children use to learn how to speak. Called fast mapping, it was originally thought to be a human trait. 

However, life is not only about knowing the names of one’s stuffed toys and bones. We often use verbs such as come, sit, and down to get dogs to fine tune a dog’s behavior, and many dogs can understand how specific words map to specific physical actions. That is just a result of good training, you might say, but this still suggests that some dogs show advanced skill where actions are understood as independent from objects. As for training, a dog’s use of human language depends very much on the willingness of the owner to establish a verbal relationship, to link words and meanings and to properly reward the behavior with a natural holistic treat such as Antlerz, a 100% naturally shed deer antler chewing treat that is rich in calcium and phosphorus and will not splinter. This premium treat is a wonderful alternative to a raw bone.

While not all dogs share an attention to words, it may be easier for one dog to figure out words more so than another. Word learning might be dependent upon how words are first introduced. The human friend who consistently differentiates words teaching,” Get your bone! Get your ball,” will often have the dog with the bigger vocabularies. If dogs do not learn to attach a variety of actions to objects, it might be harder for them to be flexible with human language.

Caring for your dog is a lifetime adventure. Keep him safe and in good spirits by feeding him a holistic dog diet, and loving him dearly. When you talk to your dog, consider that the words you speak might not carry the same meaning for both of you. Instead, other aspects of communication might be more relevant. We think that “sit” means positioning ourselves on a chair or other surface, but if you ask a dog who is already sitting to “sit,” he will most likely lie down. To him, sit means to get lower or go closer to the ground. Maybe the real lesson is that context and tone rather than the dictionary definition of a word is what may important for human communication, too.