Dachshund "Just ignore them and they’ll stop." That’s the advice every dachshund owner hears the moment they mention the pleading eyes at dinnertime, and it’s technically true in the way that "just don’t eat sugar" is technically a weight loss plan.
Here’s what that advice leaves out: ignoring a begging dachshund is not a passive act. It’s an active, exhausting, multi week commitment that will test your resolve harder than housebreaking ever did.
And ignoring alone doesn’t teach your dog what to do instead. It only removes one option while leaving a hungry, clever, low slung opportunist to invent new ones.
Dachshunds were bred to work independently underground, making decisions without human input, refusing to quit when the badger fought back. That stubbornness didn’t disappear when they moved to your couch. It just got redirected toward your plate.
A dachshund that has been rewarded for begging even once out of fifty attempts will keep trying for fifty more. Persistence is not a bug in this breed. It’s the whole design.
So let’s do this properly. Here are ten steps that actually work, in the order that actually works.
1. Admit Who Fed Them From the Table
Somebody did it. Maybe it was you, maybe it was your partner, maybe it was your father in law who visited for a weekend in 2022 and single handedly undid four months of training.
Begging is a learned behavior. Nobody is born knowing that standing near a human who is chewing produces food.
Figure out where the reinforcement came from, because if you skip this step, you’ll fix the behavior on your end while someone else quietly rebuilds it.
Have the Household Conversation
Get everyone in the same room and agree on one rule: no food leaves a human hand or plate and enters a dachshund. Not scraps, not "just a little bit," not the last bite of a hot dog bun.
Kids especially need a clear script. "We feed Otto in his bowl only" is simple enough for a five year old to repeat and follow.
2. Rule Out Actual Hunger
Before you treat this as a behavior problem, make sure it isn’t a nutrition problem.
Dachshunds are prone to weight gain and many owners overcorrect by underfeeding, which produces a genuinely hungry dog who is genuinely asking for help.
Check your portions against your vet’s recommendation, not the bag. Feeding guidelines on packaging are notoriously generous and equally notoriously vague about activity levels, age, and whether your dog spends the day sprinting or napping in a sunbeam.
If your dachshund is at a healthy weight and eating an appropriate amount, you’re looking at habit, not need.
3. Set a Feeding Schedule and Guard It
Free feeding is the enemy here. A bowl that’s always available teaches your dog that food is a constant, ambient possibility rather than a scheduled event.
Two meals a day, same times, bowl picked up after fifteen minutes whether it’s empty or not.
This does something subtle but powerful: it makes food predictable. Predictable food reduces the anxious scanning behavior that fuels a lot of begging.
4. Give Them a Job During Human Meals
Here’s where most people go wrong. They remove the begging option without offering a replacement, and a dachshund with nothing to do will always find something to do.
Pick a spot. A bed, a mat, a crate with the door open, somewhere in the room but not under the table.
Build the Place Command
Start outside of mealtimes. Toss a treat on the mat, say "place," reward when all four paws land.
Build duration slowly, five seconds, then fifteen, then a minute, always rewarding on the mat so the mat itself becomes the good thing.
Once your dachshund can hold place for two or three minutes with you standing nearby, start practicing while you eat a snack. Then a full meal. Then a full meal with the good smelling stuff.
5. Feed Your Dog Before You Eat
Simple, underrated, hugely effective.
A dachshund who has just finished dinner is a dachshund with significantly less motivation to audit yours.
Shift their mealtime to fifteen or twenty minutes before yours and let biology do some of the work for you.
6. Prepare for the Extinction Burst
This is the step nobody warns you about, and it’s the one that breaks most owners.
When a behavior that used to work suddenly stops working, dogs don’t give up quietly. They escalate. The whining gets louder, the pawing gets more insistent, the staring gets frankly unsettling.
The night your dachshund tries hardest is the night the training is working best. Escalation means the old strategy is failing, and your dog knows it.
Expect three to five days of this. Expect it to be worse than the original begging.
Hold the line, because giving in during an extinction burst doesn’t just fail to fix the problem. It teaches your dog that extreme begging works when normal begging doesn’t.
7. Manage the Environment While You Train
Willpower is a finite resource and you will not have unlimited amounts of it at 7pm on a Wednesday.
Use a baby gate. Use a closed door. Use the crate if your dachshund is crate trained and content in there.
Management Is Not Failure
Some trainers frame environmental management as cheating, which is nonsense. Management buys you the calm repetitions you need for actual learning to happen.
You’ll fade it out. But during the first two weeks, when the habit is still strong and your patience is being tested nightly, a physical barrier is worth more than any amount of grim determination.
8. Never Reward the Approach, Ever
Not with food. Not with attention. Not with eye contact, not with a laugh, not with "aww, look at him."
Dachshunds read human faces with unnerving accuracy. A single glance down at those eyes registers as a partial win, and partial wins are exactly what keep gamblers at slot machines.
The correct response to a dachshund arriving at your chair is nothing. Blank. Furniture.
9. Reward Calm, Loudly and Often
Behavior that gets attention gets repeated, so start aggressively noticing the moments your dog does nothing.
Lying quietly on the mat while you eat? That earns a calm "good," maybe a treat delivered to the mat, never to your chair.
The distinction matters enormously. Treats delivered near the table build a dog who hovers near the table. Treats delivered on the mat build a dog who parks on the mat.
Over a few weeks, your dachshund runs the math and concludes that lying down pays better than standing up. That’s the whole game.
10. Rebuild After Every Slip
Somebody will drop a piece of chicken. A guest will slip a bite of pizza. You will, in a weak moment, hand over a crust.
It happens. One slip doesn’t erase weeks of work, but it does buy you two or three days of renewed testing.
Reset Fast
Go back to strict management for a few days. Gate up, mat rewards, zero table contact.
Consistency across weeks matters far more than perfection on any single night, and a dachshund who slips back is not a failed dog. Just a dog who got new information and is checking whether it holds.
Training a dachshund is less about obedience and more about negotiation, and the party who stays consistent longest wins the contract.
The full process takes about three to four weeks for most dogs, longer if the begging habit has been reinforced for years.
But it works. It works with dachshunds who have been dining under the table since puppyhood, and it works with rescues who arrived already convinced that human food is a shared resource.
Your dinner is about to get significantly more peaceful.