I've had lots of experience training dogs before and I quickly understood the most important thing for teaching Chaos would be consistency since he is beyond smart but far as is known was never taught self control and such things before he came to me. Cue 30 minute training sessions everyday, running through all known tricks once numerous points across the day, staying on top of him, incorporating training in every game I can, taking any opportunity I see to teach him in some way what I want of him.
However, my household is turning into something of a problem for his training. A month back I started teaching him 'Take' went through the whole nine yards of teaching him in multiple settings like every other command he knows, the trouble began right after he learned this. Clearly, my next step was to begin teaching him 'Give' by using 'Take' to create a scenario where he would succeed every time for a week by having him take something of lesser value than the reward for giving it to me, before trying to move onto something slightly more difficult. Instantly when we started this I noticed something was wrong, step two wasn't going to happen because a week of step one had resulted in not a single give, in fact it resulted in tugging much more often than giving. To say the least I was confused as he had never had trouble learning something before and turkey is a far more valuable thing to him than the rag I was using for the take portion. Well shortly after watching my family I realized what went wrong. He's always had habit of grabbing things with our scent when they're left on the floor, which is natural for a dog anyways, I even use this to my advantage if he's having trouble sleeping by giving him one of my two blankets which settles him down near instantly. Going with prevention I had avoided giving him the chance to take something if I didn't want him to have it in the first place, the other three people in the house had not, so they'd been essentially playing tug of war chanting 'give, give, give' over and over trying to get something they'd left on the floor from him.
Realizing the command had been ruined before it was taught I decided to change the word I was using to 'release' and start all over. Cue starting over this time switching to three tennis balls instead of the rag and turkey, to give him an edge because I knew he'd drop one for the other without second thought and cycling three would prevent him from thinking everything I tell him to release gets instantly taken away from him as I knew due to my family ripping so many things he thought he was allowed to have from him that he would only resist if he thought it was only to get the ball from him. At first this worked perfectly, two days of perfect success which he even began incorporating into our ball games himself without my prompting. Once more I could get anything I needed to away from him simple and easy. Now four days later things have changed and he is once more having trouble, a quick glance at my family revealed this story is repeating itself, they've started chanting 'release, release, release' when he is not giving something up and even when he starts tugging instead of giving, holding him in place and continuously speaking to him until he loosens for a split second and they can rip it from him at which point he's left to his own devices.
I've asked them to stop but they simply go 'yeah' and do it again the same day, causing taking and holding onto something instead of giving it up to be very rewarding for him because not only does he think its a game but he gets tons of attention for doing it, and it corrupts the cue I'm trying to teach him. Is there anything I can do to help him stop learning the wrong thing from them? I've never had my family actively working against me on these things before, so I don't have the slightest clue on how to counter what they're doing to allow him to learn what he needs to.
