There are difference between dogs and humans. The human sees a puppy. The human falls head over heels in love with the puppy. They bring them home. Everyone in the family falls head over heels in love with the puppy. The puppy does something quite natural. The human looks at it, turns it nose up a bit, scalds the little puppy. The puppy gets the message and after a while stops doing it.

When the human is house training us, we make mistakes, we learn, we sometimes get a little chastised but in the end we try and figure out what are the rules and we try and keep to them. The same does not happen the other way around. You can put all the effort you have got into house training your human and they may never get the message.

Take shoes! Sorry I did not mean you to go off and find the nearest pair of slippers for a good chew. I meant, let us considers, shoes. As part of their house training humans have to learn that if they have a new pup in the house and they leave there favourite pair of fine leather shoes on the floor in the same room as the pup there is a strong chance that the pup will chew the shoe.

You would imagine that they would be like dogs and be able to learn things. We make a mistake, we get chastised and we try and learn from the mistake.

With humans it is very different. They come in from the shops with a very expensive pair of leather shoes. They try the shoes on and then leave it on the living room floor. We see the shoe and have a sniff. Nice chewy leather! Another sniff. Irresistible chewy leather! We have a little chew. Then get caught. Our human goes wild. We get called a few names, maybe a sharp slap. We get the message, the human does not want us to bite the shoes.

But wait! They leave the shoes in exactly the same place. We know they were very angry about something. We thought they were angry about our chewing their new shoes. However, it must have been something else. Why would they leave the shoes on the ground for us if they did not want us to play with them? So we sit down and have a nibble wondering what exactly the human was annoyed it.

We definitely need to house train humans and the first thing they should know is if it’s on the floor the dog will chew it.