my-chihuahua.com

Is your dog’s bad behavior causing you stress? Don’t just put it with it. It’s time to begin some serious dog training. This means you need to be persistent and consistent with your training. However, make sure your training is always fun or your dog may get bored!

Understand Your Dog Basic Needs

Having a dog is a responsibility. If you don’t fulfill your dog’s basic needs, don’t be surprised if you have a badly behaved  or neurotic dog. 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 dog training is to understand positive and negative reinforcement. When your dog does a behavior that is desired, you should reward him with a treat or affection. The treat or affection must come as soon after the behavior as humanly possible in order for it to be effective.

It’s best to concentrate on positive reinforcement for desired behaviors rather than negative reinforcement for behaviors you want to stop. This has been found to be a more productive way of training.

Physical punishment is not productive or humane way to train dogs and will only lead to your dog being neurotic and fearful. That’s not going to be a good relationship between man and dog. You can say a firm “No” in a growling tone of voice to stop him behaving badly. Perhaps most effective is to ignore your dog when he behaves badly. Dogs love attention and if you ignore him – that will be negative reinforcement in itself.

At all costs you should avoid humanizing your dog. Dogs have their own way of communicating which you will not understand unless you study it. 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.

Another important aspect of training is to position yourself as the pack leader. If your dog is pack leader, he is never going to be well-behaved for you because he thinks you are one of his pack. Some pointers to set yourself up as alpha dog:
-eat a biscuit or two in front of your dog just before you feed him. The pack leader always eats first.
-don’t let him to onto the sofa or bed. The alpha dog sleeps on higher ground.
-don’t allow him to go through the door before you.

This is an introduction to some important points in dog training. I recommend you look into the most systematic of training methods: clicker training for dogs.

Popularity: 3% [?]