They are called commands, not request, and I give them in a calm but commanding tone.
I agree with Maxy here:
I want my dog to listen because I trained him the commands and he's following them because he wants to, not because I punish or may soon punish him (even if you haven't in this context, he may associate that voice with a punishment). I don't view command giving as a "you better do it", I am asking her to do things, not making her do things and Phoebe is happy to say "ok!" because I've trained her to want to listen to me. She always has a choice. if anything my tone IS happy, it keeps her focused on me, monotone is boring.
Well said!
I don't call them "commands" anyway. My dog does not do behaviors because I told her to and she knows to follow my every wish. She does them because she has been rewarded for the behavior in the past.
For example, when I teach sit, I start by just teaching the behavior without a cue. When the dog learns that doing *that* behavior gets him reinforcement, he will do it quickly and predictibly. That's when I teach him what *that* behavior is called... just before he does it, I say "sit," so that he hears the cue, does the behavior, and gets reinforced for it. It's simply naming the behavior that he already knows. Later when I cue "sit," my dog understands that this is his chance for getting reinforcement for that behavior he's learned, and he does it because he knows the behavior gets him good stuff.
And whether you are calling it a "cue" or a "command" or a "request" or whatever, you ARE
asking your dog to do it; your dog has a choice of whether or not to do it (assuming he actually does know what the behavior is). If I TELL my dog to sit and he doesn't do it, can I MAKE him do it? Well, yeah, I could push him down, but that's only going to work once or twice and he'll learn to avoid that. What if I TELL my dog to retrieve and he doesn't do it, can I MAKE him do it then? NO. So every cue IS a request; it doesn't matter if you see it that way or not, that IS the way your dog sees it. (Unless you have a robot dog.
)
The trick is that you control the consequences. If you ask your dog to do something and he does it, you can give him reinforcement to increase the likelihood of him doing it the next time you ask him to. If you ask him to do something and he doesn't do it, you can give him a punisher (positive punishment, like a correction, or negative punishment, like a time-out) to decrease the likelihood of him not doing the behavior next time.