Good dog training will always involve getting your dog to behave the way you want him to. It will also involve training him well so that he knows where to do potty. It will also involve getting him to do several tricks that you want him to know. In all these different aspects of dog training, you will also need to remember that you won’t establish these effectively without a good dose of bonding time and a special kind of communication between you and your pet.
Therefore, it should be of utmost consideration that you regard your pet with respect intended for a friend as well as a companion. A good dog owner should bear in mind that punishments aren’t good and it isn’t allowed to do any physical harm to your pet.
While training your dog to do several things that will enable him to be an overall good dog, you should need to remember that you only need to make use of a good reward system that may involve giving him his favorite cookies or even giving him a special toy each time he does something successfully.
Behavior Change Is The Essence Of Good Dog Training
Of course, good dog training will involve behavior modifications that will entail you to change certain bad aspects of your dog’s behavior. Excessive barking may pose a big problem especially when the barking doesn’t stop all day long. It should also be a good thing for you to check out why your dog keeps barking.
Dogs only bark when something seems threatening to them or when they want to do potty. If you have already ruled out everything else, it will be a good thing to simply tell your dog sternly to stop barking. If this doesn’t change things at all, letting your dog roam around your household may be the thing that will do the trick.
Reminding your dog about good behavior can be done by simply reminding him to stop barking when he does it. Dogs understand their owners, and it will help if you talk to your dog occasionally.
Potty can be done via the designated area you give him. It would be better if you accompany him to the said area regularly especially when he begins to show you signs of wanting to do potty. Do this up until he gets to associate potty with the designated place you set for it.
Good training only happens if you see to it that you get to maintain good bonding time with your dog. Your dog needs to trust you, and you can only achieve this if you see to it that he knows you deserve the trust he is willing to give.
Dogs are wonderful pets to have around the house. They didn’t earn the title for being man’s best friend for nothing. However, that can only be the case if you improve the relationship with your dog. Beginning that relationship can be tough and it depends on the breed as well.
At first, you can try giving him commands, and he may not respond all the time. Getting frustrated or neglecting your dog just because he isn’t smart enough isn’t the right way to go and it certainly won’t improve his behavior either.
If you stay confident and consistent when it comes to spending your time with your dog, your dog may show some signs of obedience. Misbehaving can still be a possibility so don’t be surprised. Fortunately, there are some ways you can improve your dog’s behavior even further if you better understand how dogs behave and how obedience training plays a major role.
Understanding Dog Behavior
No matter what breed of dog you are dealing with, you will be dealing with a dog that has a pack mentality. It is very important to know this because once your dog gets settled in the home, either he will think he is the leader or he will think you are the leader.
Once the dog feels he is the leader of the pack, the behavioral problems come into play where he gets the freedom of controlling the pace and do whatever he wishes. It is not too late if your dog has that mentality as it can be corrected through consistent obedience training.
Why Obedience Training is Important
When you are training your dog for obedience, you are strengthening the bond between you as the master and your dog. This is not only essential to make your dog more responsive to commands, but it also helps develop a good personality towards you.
Remember that dogs have their feelings and make their own decisions as well. Once your dog sees you as his master, he will remain a faithful companion that very rarely gets out of control. To fully eliminate bad behavior, put enough effort into obedience training and then concentrate on caring for your dog throughout its lifespan. If you need help with obedience training, you can try enrolling him in a course.
Getting Started with Obedience Training
Giving your dog attention every day is a simple approach and good opening to serious obedience training. Here the dog gets to know you better and responds to your actions. You also need to make sure your dog is properly fed with a diet that is ideal to the breed. As you continue to feed and play with your dog, you will notice signs of good behavior and bad behavior.
When you notice really good behavior, reward him by petting him or feeding him a nice treat. This practice encourages him to do more of that which will result in better behavior. On the other hand, if he does something bad, do not reward him and more importantly give a very light form of punishment such as stopping the activity. Avoid resorting to physical forms of punishment.
These methods are very basic methods of obedience training, and they are rather effective as long as you practice them consistently and do it early so you can run into fewer problems when he gets older.
Put in simple words, teaching your dog how to behave in a particular situation is known as dog training. If you own a dog, training it should be one of your most important routine tasks. It’s all about communicating effectively with your dog.
Training strengthens the bond between the dog and the family. For training to be successful, it is very important that your dog enjoys the training, so make training a fun activity and not let your dog take it as a routine chore.
Guarding, hunting, retrieving, searching, and obedience are some of the most common things that dogs are trained on. You need to instill the liking for training in your dog at a very early age. So the process of training should start right at the beginning when you bring the little puppy into your house. And don’t forget that training is a perpetual process. You will find it very difficult to train a dog that has already learned something that you did not want it to learn.
The training must be focused on educating the dogs about developing his instincts and living with people in his house. It also involves making it unlearn the undesirable things that he may have learned accidentally in the past. You may be surprised, but you can bribe your dog so that he gets interested in the training! In training through bribery, the dog is awarded its favorite food or some toy when he completes a command.
At times, you may become disappointed thinking the training isn’t helping your dog. But be positive, it may just take a little longer than you had assumed. The reason is simple! It also takes time for you to learn to train the dog. The most difficult thing in the training, as you may know, is to communicate with your dog.
While training, you also need to understand the emotional state of your dog. This will give you a direction for your training. Even your dog goes through mood swings, and if it is not in the mood to be trained, your efforts will be futile. Further, if you fail to reward your dog for the training, this smart creature will again lose faith and the training will get more difficult for you. Training involves rewarding the dog for good behavior so that he continues to behave in that manner.
As a matter of fact, most modern trainers use the positive training methods and hence use reward-based training to promote good etiquette in dogs. These trainers avoid using physical punishments to promote good behavior. The goal here is to make the dog do something even on occasions when the trainer has no reward to offer. This happens because the dog’s training has taught him that the handler may have a reward even if the dog cannot see it.
You may consider using electronic dog training collars which will not cause any harm to your pet during training. These shock collars are used in various training exercises like hunting, agility training, retrieving and so on. Although shock collars are not harmful to dogs, you should be able to judge whether they need them or not. Your positive attitude can be very helpful in imparting this seemingly difficult training to your dog.
Naturally, every dog owner would like their dog to behave and learn obedience, so they train their dog either with the help of a handler or just by themselves. Unfortunately, not all pet training can be thought of as successful. Most of the time training fails because there are some things that may have been overlooked. Let’s talk about dog training and the things linked with the training.
To train your pet dog, there are methods or techniques involved. Once just doesn’t act like he’s the boss for your pet dog to listen to. Common sense dictates that the understanding of pets and owner are very far apart, so don’t expect your pet dog to obey you, especially in the beginning.
So what do you do to make your pet obey?
First, you need to have an understanding of the principles of training your dog. What are these principles? There are three simple principles behind dog training, and these are reinforcement, punishment, and extinction.
What exactly is reinforcement?
Reinforcement is the dog’s behavior towards the trainer. There are only two outcomes: the dog either behaves better or worse. Let us break reinforcement into two categories. They are positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement.
Positive reinforcement can be done by giving your dog praises and rewards. By doing this, your dog can understand that it will be rewarded as long as it obeys or behaves. Therefore, it will try its best to listen to you. Next, we shall move on to negative reinforcement.
Negative reinforcement is where the trainer removes an unpleasant situation to make the dog obey. Let’s take teaching a dog how to sit for example. If you want to teach a dog how to sit, you put pressure on the collar and release the pressure once the dog obeys you.
We shall move on to the next principle; punishment. Again, we can categorize it into two categories; positive punishment or the negative punishment. Punishment is considered positive when the trainer punishes the dog, and the outcome of it is a dog’s behavior turns out to be better. However, a negative punishment is when the trainer takes away something that the dog likes or enjoys and the behavior is diminished or eliminated.
The last principle is extinction. Extinction in this context means total elimination of behavior. This happens when a certain behavior is not reinforced, thus causing it to be eliminated or extinct. For example, your pet dog may whine as it wants to go out to play. By sticking to your stand, of not letting it go out to play, eventually, the dog will learn that whining will do him no good, so it stops.
For most people, they believe that positive reinforcement is the best way to train a dog. Yes, it may be for some, but this might not work for the others. So before taking on any of the principles discussed, it is still better to have an assessment of your dog’s behavior before any training. In this way, you will know which of the principles would give you the best chance of success when it comes to training your dog.
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