Has anyone ever had to deal with this before?

[Nellie122]

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. 

[Flora & Molly]

I'm sorry to hear your family is working against you. I can imagine it must be frustrating!

Perhaps you could use a hand gesture instead of a word? My sister taught my dog to "give" during games of fetch by making a grabbing/clawing gesture under the dogs mouth as if to say "drop it in my hand". She wouldn't throw the ball/stick if the dog didn't drop whatever it was in her hand. The dog figured it out after a while. 

Maybe this way your family can't make it into a tugging game, because the dog drops it in your hand. You don't take it from the dogs mouth, but catch it just below it's mouth when the dogs let's the object go.

I've actually trained my dog from the grab gesture to gently place it in my hand. It's not reliable yet with some objects  though (sticks are difficult, she is too excited), but she is very good with my slippers. 

Another thing we taught her was to "drop it". This is mostly for filthy things we don't want to touch, or if we want to kick the ball instead of throwing it. We use a gesture as well as a verbal cue. The gesture is to tap your feet on the floor.

I hope this helps! It sounds like you have a great bond with your dog, I hope you can find a way to do what you want with your dog without having your family undo all your (and your dog's) hard work.

[jami74]

I second the hand gesture. Plus, you can probably do it nice and discreetly and maybe they won't notice.

I also think though that these dogs are clever enough to realize that they can get away with different things with different people. One example with our boy is that I use 'Down' to mean go into the down position and 'Off' to get off the furniture whereas my partner will tell him to 'Get down, down, down' when he's on the furniture and he doesn't have any trouble working out who wants what from him. Do you think if you persevere, maybe having to go back to the beginning and keep on reinforcing it, that he'll learn that when you say it, it means something different than when everyone else says it?

I use quite a lot of hand gestures alongside the word. If he's very focussed he'll respond to either, if we're in a distracting environment I need both.

[GentleLake]

Sounds like you need to spend some time training your family.

[RainDrops]

Does he have specific toys designated for tug? My dog likes to tug, but I discourage playing tug with most of her toys or random objects. She has two tug toys, and she knows that if I'm holding one of those, she's welcome to tug on it. Maybe if he has more of a structured use of toys, he will learn the difference between something he can tug and something he gets no reward for. If you try to do this, I would suggest never letting him have a tug toy on his own. Keep it away where he can't reach it unless you decide to take it out.

I just taught drop by making it a game, with a cycle of tug, drop, leave it (when I lay the tug toy on the ground) and get it (when I grab it and wiggle it for her to grab). I don't know about drop with random objects though, because we haven't had that problem.

[D'Elle]

I second what Gentle Lake said. No matter what you do, if your family is working against you there will not be success. It is not fair to keep changing the cue to your dog and expecting him to keep having success. He will get confused, and may very well refuse to learn the behavior at all. You need to spend time with your family stressing to them that training this dog is not a game that they can interfere with. Tell them that what they are doing will result in a confused dog and that confusion leads to stress in border collies, stress leads to compulsive behavior and can go as far as to create a neurotic and problematic dog. They do not realize how important this is. It is up to you to get them to understand, and to change their behavior; it is not up to the dog to learn something in a way which they cannot spoil, which is not possible. If there is no consistency in training the dog, and I mean consistency throughout the family, the training will not be effective no matter what you try.