Dogs are not capable of the intelligent and analytical thinking that their human owners are, so never assume your pup is as smart as you are. Making this assumption when training your dog results in disappointment and even disaster. This article will help you understand how your dog thinks and improve your communication and training skills.
If you are working on crate training your indoor puppy or dog, you can always try a few tricks. If your puppy doesn’t like being in his crate, put a dog treat or chew bone in it and close the door to keep him out. If a dog sees something in the crate that they want, they will desire to enter it. After your dog goes into the crate, give positive reinforcement to increase the chance that he will go into the crate again.
Don’t reinforce your dog’s negative behavior by accident. This means denying your dog treats and praise whenever it misbehaves. For instance, if you are trying to train your dog to not jump on you, you shouldn’t be petting them whenever they do so.
Continuously maintain all training that you have done with your dog, and consider adding new behaviors as you go. Some dog owners make the mistake of thinking that once training has ended, no further action is required. Some dogs will revert back to negative behaviors if the training does not continue. It is important that the training your dog receives is reinforced regularly.
Make sure training periods are short in duration. The attention span of a dog is pretty short, so it is important to keep them interested in training by keeping the training short. If you want to do anymore training, let the dog have a play break for stretching and relaxing before continuing with their training.
Your dog will behave well if you keep reinforcing your training. Puppy’s aren’t the only dogs that can learn. By continually reinforcing obedient behaviors and disciplining negative behaviors, you will have a dog that behaves appropriately.
Train your dog to stop barking with a treat. For instance, whenever your dog is barking, hold a treat in front of them and continue to repeat “be quiet” until they quit barking. You can then give it the treat. If you do this a lot of times your dog will know if they are not barking they will get a treat.
A key part of puppy training is to start early. It is much easier to get a dog to learn the right way rather than making it unlearn its bad habits. Giving your dog scraps from the table is just training the dog that begging gets results, so don’t do it!
Changing your vocal tone depending on what you want to communicate will help train your dog. For example, use a different tone when praising your dog than you do when commanding your dog to obey. You should use a firm tone of voice for your commands, a loud tone for your scoldings, and a natural, pleasant tone for your praise.
Do not give up when you’re training your dog. You will need to give your dog continuous reinforcement, or he or she will go back to how they were before being trained. Training is something you do with your dog all the time, just like feeding and grooming him.
Challenge your dog frequently. Test what he knows by giving commands, even if you are sure that he has the skill mastered.
Older Dog
Senior dogs do have some limits. An older dog will never be able to be trained perfectly. They all have little quirks that you should learn to embrace! There may be strongly entrenched habits and attitudes in an older dog. While teaching new habits to him may not be impossible, it is sometimes better to focus on negative things you can change and get used to living with the other habits.
After learning some helpful hints on how to get through to your dog and train it to behave to your expectations you simply need to follow what you have learned. After changing your dogs behavior to fit with the tips suggested you can properly train your dog.