Understanding innate dog behavior can go a long way towards creating a strong bond between you and your pet. Here's everything you need to know.
Innate Dog Behavior
Domesticated dogs have wolf blood in their ancestry, and along with the blood comes a collection of instincts that served their forebears in the harsh wilderness. Even the most tame and sweet pooch today has vestiges of the wild instincts, and if you learn to recognize them, you will understand your dog a lot better.
The pack mentality- Dogs are instinctive pack animals, meaning they will look for a strong 
leader who will tell them what to do. Because of the hierarchical nature of any pack, there must always be a leader and followers. The leader of the pack should be you in your household, not your dog. According to expert studies, dogs really do want to know their position in the pack, and they feel more secure and happy when they know their place. Being a submissive follower is not a negative thing for them; in fact, knowing the rules of their world and having you as their leader is what they really want.
Law of reward and punishment- Dogs don't learn morality and ethics like humans do. They act according to what is pleasant for them, and avoid the things that are painful or difficult. When you reward your dog's behavior, he will repeat his actions to get the reward again. He'll learn that the behavior is desirable and positive. When you punish or correct (or even ignore) certain behaviors, he will tend to stop doing them because it's not beneficial or pleasant for him to continue.
Short-term memory- As humans grow and develop, we become able to make connections between unrelated things and see causes and effects even when they're not immediate. Dogs, on the other hand, do not see correlations unless they are immediate. No matter how old and wise they get, this is simply a skill they will not develop. This means that punishing your dog in the evening for shredding the newspaper that morning will only confuse him. He won't realize the shredding is what was unacceptable; he'll think it was whatever he did immediately before the punishment, even if it was coming when you called him. This is the reason you should never call your dog to come to you so you can punish him. It will only teach him that coming when you call gets him a scolding. By following strict training practices, you can minimize innate dog behavior.
