The Dog Blog

Is your dog driving you crazy with his bad behavior? Don’t put it off any longer. It’s time to start some consistent dog training. This means you need to proceed with consistency and persistency with your training. However, make sure your training is always fun or your dog may get bored!

Understand Your Dog Basic Needs

Your dog has to rely on you to provide for him. If you don’t fulfill your dog’s basic needs, it shouldn’t be a surprise if your dog behaves badly. What are the basic needs? Here are the main ones:

• water and food
• regular daily exercise
• social interaction with dogs and people
• an environment which stimulates him.

The main point in training your dog is to understand 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 vital that the reward comes immediately after the desired behavior or the two things will not be connected by the dog.

It’s best to concentrate on positive reinforcement for behavior you want to encourage rather than negative reinforcement for bad behaviors. This has been found to be a more effective way of training.

Physical punishment is not productive or humane 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 engaging in an unwanted behavior. Perhaps most effective is to ignore your dog when he does something you don’t like. Dogs crave attention and if you ignore him – that will be negative reinforcement in itself.

You should learn to see your dog as a dog, not a human being. It will help you to do this if you study dog communication and the dynamics of a dog pack. You need to learn what their body language means: the position of the tail, the mouth positions, the ear position and the sounds they make.

Being pack leader or alpha dog is vital if you want your dog to behave well. 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 pointers to set yourself up as pack leader:
-eat a some food in front of your dog as he waits for his food. The pack leader always eats before the pack members.
-don’t allow him to onto the sofa or bed. 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 obedience training for dogs. I recommend you look into the most systematic of training methods: dog clicker training.

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