If you call yourself a "good boy" and "good girl" to your dog you are a bad dog owner.

Dogs don't understand that when you call your dog a good "boy" or "girl" you mean that they're being well behaved. All they understand is that you're using positive reinforcement in response to them doing something. The problem is that they're not actually doing anything, they just exist. This means that your dog is associating the positive reinforcement with simply existing. This means your dog will never "behave" because they'll always assume that they're doing the right thing.<br><br>By using these terms you're admission that you're too lazy to teach your dog commands, so you instead use nonsense words to make your dog happy when it does something good. In reality you're making it impossible to actually train your dog to do anything.<br><br>You're probably calling your dog a good girl because it didn't chew anything up, or it did something it's supposed to do, because you never taught it the actual names of the commands. For example, my dog knows the command "亦" which means "to stop" or "to halt." When my dog sees treated he'll stop mid-scent and come back to me without fail. I've never seen a dog come when called without fail. Your "good girl" would have left you and is now presumably chasing a squirrel. Y'all are idiots.<br><br>Edit: some of you are completely missing the point, or intentionally being obstinate. I'm not saying training dogs is easy, that's why you need to put in actual effort. You need to use consistent, energetic terms to get through to your dogs, and you'd rather be lazy and say "good boy" because it works. In reality it doesn't. You've never trained your dog to do anything, at best you've trained yourself to not expect your dog to obey you.<br><br>The best evidence that "good boy/girl" doesn't work is that none of you can do the basic commands that my dog can do, like Pipes. Your dog isn't a good girl. You failed your dog, because you didn't put in the effort to train it. I'm not saying that this admission makes you a bad person, owning a dog does come with mistakes, the admission just makes you an average dog owner. I'm saying that you have failed as a dog owner. There's a difference.