At first, it can seem like a harmless behavior with zero consequences. You walk into your kitchen to find that your dog has finished the remaining scraps of dinner from your kitchen counter before you had the opportunity to scoop them into the trash. Upon catching your dog finishing the final morsel of food, you smile, shake your head, and think to yourself that your dog is just a lovable rogue who was just doing what most dogs would do – devouring the food that we didn’t want to eat.
As time progresses, however, a pattern emerges. Your dog continues to engage in this behavior, and your frustration starts to increase as your dog continues to counter surf and pick scraps from the leftovers of your meals. Worse still is the next occasion, when you catch your dog surfing the counter before your family dinner has been served; to compound the problem, the meal contains chicken bones, onions and garlic (which are all hazardous to their health) and now you’re possibly headed to the emergency veterinarian.
Without realizing it, the harmless behavior with zero consequences has transformed into an incredibly frustrating behavior that could potentially have severe ramifications for your dog’s health.
This doomsday scenario is used to illustrate why counter surfing is not a behavior that we should tolerate from our dogs. It is not just a potential risk to their health but the fact of the matter is, your dog is pushing boundaries that can bleed into other areas where they’ll push more boundaries. This can lead to your dog not respecting your rank in their family unit. It is essential to nip this problem in the bud before it progresses from a minor inconvenience to a significant health problem or other behavioral issue.
In this article, we’ll look at counter surfing in detail, and help you to understand how you can prevent your dog from engaging in this behavior.
Why do dogs counter surf?
Perhaps a better question to ask is, “Why wouldn’t your dog counter surf?”. Dogs are contextual learners, and combined with this, they are very perceptive to situations in which they are rewarded (intentionally or unintentionally).
Dogs are descendants of wolves, and wolves are opportunistic hunters. They never know when their next meal is coming, so if there’s an opportunity, they’ll take it! Wolves eat grass, berries, fish, small mammals, large mammals – and if a dead carcass presents itself, that’s their version of counter surfing.
If your dog wants food, and realizes that they can obtain food by putting their front paws up on the counter and eating everything in sight (without any form of correction or instruction to change their behavior), then your dog is being unintentionally rewarded with every mouthful they take from the food on your counter. This is positive reinforcement through a self-reinforcing behavior!
Prevention is better than cure
In most walks of life, it is typically better to take steps to stop something bad from happening, rather than trying to perform remedial action after the fact. This is true with your dog’s counter surfing habit – you have to be proactive to prevent them from engaging in this self-rewarding behavior.
The first step, before you work on your dog’s behavior in this scenario, is to actually look at your own behavior. If you remove the temptation of food on the counter, your dog will have no incentive to counter surf. With this in mind, you can introduce a rule in your home that no food is left on countertops – no matter how small it might seem. When meals are completed, immediately transfer any leftovers to storage containers or the trash. Additionally, when preparing meals, never leave food unattended on a chopping board that could reward your dog’s counter surfing.
Teaching alternative behaviors
While we can improve our own behavior to reduce our dog’s propensity for counter surfing, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t a valuable training opportunity for our dogs. Teaching them to perform an alternative behavior gives you greater control of the environment during meal preparation, particularly for those situations where our own focus may slip (ex: we have to take a phone call, or answer the front door, and leave our food prep unattended).
Here are some alternatives you can work on with your dog to help prevent them counter surfing:
- “Place.” The place command gives your dog the instruction to go to their bed and relax until they are released. This can create distance between your dog and any food being prepared, which is valuable in situations where you may be multi-tasking and unable to be vigilant about your dog, the food you are preparing, and anything else that might be happening in your home at the same time.
- “Leave it.” For this command, you may need to stage a couple of scenarios to train your dog to leave items alone at your command. You can set up a training scenario with food on the ground; if your dog makes a move towards it, you can say no and reset them. Then, you will build duration and use a Continuation Marker just like you would a Clicker to mark and reward them in position with their training treats. After this, you can remove the tantalizing food you sit on the ground for the training scenario, put it away, and then release them with a Terminal Marker and a reward event for leaving it alone. This can be beneficial in other contexts where your dog is getting into something in the woods that is gross and could make them sick, or even a snake that they’ve spotted.
Once the dog understands the behavior that we are asking of them, you can use Positive Punishment like a correction if “No” is insufficient and they try to make a move for the food item or anything where they’ve been asked to “Leave it”. - “Off.” Similar to ‘Leave it’, this is something you may need to stage to be able to teach your dog. The process is very similar, too – you’ll pair the reward with the “Off’ command to tell your dog not to put their paws on the countertop or get “Off” the furniture. This can also be used if you have a dog who you are trying to stop from climbing on furniture and beds, or is standing up on someone.
Troubleshooting tips
Taken in isolation, counter surfing is actually one of the easier behavioral concerns to resolve – if you are consistent with your behavior. When you consider that the easiest and simplest resolution to this behavior is simply removing the temptation, it should be easy, right? However, counter surfing often becomes a recurring problem when the humans in the home are not consistent and don’t set themselves or the dog up for success.
Below are some tips to help troubleshoot if your dog is a perennial counter surfer:
- Make sure your entire family is on the same page. Everyone in the household must have the same mindset – that your dog’s counter surfing is unacceptable. It is of no use if Mom is diligent about putting food away as soon as possible, but five minutes later, Dad is preparing a snack and leaves some tasty morsels on the counter for your dog to eat.
- No feeding from the table. We’ve all been there when dogs are fed from the table at the end of meals – in fact, occasionally, they are beckoned to put their paws on the table and lick plates clean. All this does is tell your dog that it is okay to counter surf (or table surf) sometimes. It’s no different than teaching a dog a new behavior in training, except you are reinforcing an undesirable behavior! Resist the temptation to feed your dog from the dinner table.
- Don’t take out your frustration on the dog. Even with the best of intentions, there will be times when we slip up – the doorbell rings, we spend 10 minutes chatting to our neighbor on the doorstep, and we return to the kitchen and find that expensive roast we’ve been preparing is half-eaten. This was your mistake, not your dog’s – so don’t let your frustration get the better of you and begin yelling at your dog. In addition, you haven’t caught them in the act and you’ve missed the moment to address the behavior. You’ll just need to reset and try to ensure it doesn’t happen again in the future.
In conclusion
Counter surfing might not be the most serious or egregious of canine behavioral concerns, but it is a habit we should seek to eradicate if we want to have control over our environment. Furthermore, it can prevent our dog from consuming food that could make them unwell.
If you are struggling with a habitual counter surfer and don’t know where to turn, we are here to help! Please reach out to us at info@k9evolutionsdogtraining.com or call (612) 227-7019 for more details on how we can help you and your dog.
