Is your dog’s bad behavior causing you stress? Don’t put it off any longer. It’s time to get down to some consistent obedience training for your dog. This means you need to be consistent and persistent with your training. However, training should always be fun for your dog or it will quickly get bored!
What Are Your Dog’s Basic Need?
Having a dog is a responsibility. If you don’t fulfill your dog’s basic needs, it shouldn’t be a surprise if your dog’s behavior continues to stress you out. What are the basic needs? Here are the main ones:
- water and food
- regular daily exercise
- company and social interaction
- a stimulating environment.
The main principle in dog training is to adopt positive and negative reinforcement. When your dog does a behavior that you want to encourage, you should reward him with a treat or affection. It’s very important that the reward comes immediately after the wanted behavior or the dog will not connect the two thing.
It’s best to focus on positive reinforcement for wanted behaviors rather than negative reinforcement for undesired behaviors. This has been found to be a more productive way of training.
Physical punishment is not an effective or compassionate way to train dogs and will only lead to a fearful and neurotic dog. You can say a firm “No” in a growling tone of voice to stop him behaving badly. Ignoring your dog and turning away from him is the most productive thing for you to do when he misbehaves. Dogs want your attention and being ignored is negative reinforcement enough.
An important aspect of training is to understand that a dog is a dog, not a human being. Don’t humanize him. Dogs have their own way of communicating which you will not understand unless you study it. You should study what their body language means: the position of the tail, the mouth positions, the ear position and the sounds they make.
Another important aspect of training is to position yourself as the pack leader. If your dog is the alpha dog, you will be fighting a losing battle to get him to behave as you want. Why would he take notice of one of his pack member? Some advice on setting yourself up as pack leader:
-eat a some food in front of your dog just before you feed him. The alpha dog always eats before the pack members.
-don’t let him to onto the bed or sofa. The alpha dog sleeps on higher ground.
-make sure you go through doors before your dog.
This is an introduction to some important points in dog training. I recommend you look into the most systematic of training methods: clicker training.
