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Tips for Training Your DogThe Resource for Everything About Dogs |
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Tips for Training Your Dogby Jason Ryan
A crucial and beneficial task to undertake with your dog is to train it properly. Training allows you to connect with your dog through communication. This connection is vital in directing your dog to follow your commands, as well as establishing a good lifelong relationship. Training is not the panacea for all behavior issues, but it's a good foundational start. Dogs are definitely social beings, but behave like wild animals when not provided the proper training. This means your dog will bite you, fight with other dogs, dig in the yard, bark too much, damage your property and dirty your home. These canine behavioral issues are actually normal dog activities, but the timing and the subject of focus is all wrong. To illustrate this, a dog must do its business outside, but does not wait and goes on the rug instead. Perhaps the dog does not just bark at a suspicious prowler, but barks the entire night instead. Or, the dog prefers to gnaw on your shoes instead of the toys you've provided. The critical message you must impart to your dog is that these behaviors need to be redirected to the proper time and place. Training establishes the "pecking order" too. Your dog shows respect to you just through simple compliance for commands like "sit" and "come." However, you and your dog should derive rewards and fun times from training. Proper training makes living together a pleasurable and rewarding experience. The well-trained canine actually can be given more freedom and is a much more confident pet as compared to a dog with no boundaries on behavior. Your home is the venue where you should do the training. Don?t pick an area with a lot of distractions for your dog; it should be an area your dog is used to. Once you are confident that your dog has mastered a few compliance commands, you can then move on to different locations. Remember that you want people who visit to see your dog comply with all your commands. What?s the point if your dog sits on command in the backyard, but does not do so when visitors are at your home? The big test of dog training success is to see your dog respond to commands in public places. Dog obedience training lessons should be short on time, but long on results. Scheduling long and meticulous dog training sessions will only become tedious and unproductive in the end. The best way to schedule dog training is to integrate it within day-to-day activities. Your dog training sessions should be structured so that both you and your pet derive benefit from it. Integrate dog training sessions during activities your dog loves, and your dog will associate those favorite activities with the training. From your dog's perspective, it should see that everything is training and training is everything. You will find that the most profound theme in that dog training should be rewarding to your dog for the appropriate responses. The speed at which the dog learns is directly associated with the frequency of rewards. This means that practice will involve rewarding good behaviors in quick succession. Never take your dog?s good behavior lightly and make sure that praise is given quickly. If a dog barks too much, it always gets attention, but we fail to notice our dog acting properly at times. It is human nature to focus on the bad behaviors and ignore the good. But with dogs, a system of proper actions and quick rewards are vital for the prevention of future problems. Dogs get exasperated too when all they hear is, "No, get down, bad dog!" The constant nagging also has a tendency to make a dog apathetic to your commands. If there is a consistent system of rewards for appropriate behavior, then when your dog behaves badly and gets scolded, it has a greater impact. Remember to not just scold your dog, but show what you desire from it and immediately reward the behavior when done right. For example, you can show your dog its own toys right after scolding it for chewing on some household item. You can get excited about the dog?s toys and give a reward when the dogs play with them. The tone of your voice, if used properly, is all that is needed for correcting bad behavior. Stick to reprimands that are concise, short and quick, and avoid nagging. Do not scold your dog if you have not caught the wrong behavior right away, as it will have little meaning after some time has passed. Late reprimands do little good and can even worsen the wrong behavior in your dog. Inappropriate reprimanding can make your dog aggressive, timid, afraid of the raised hand, apt to chew and bark excessively.
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