First Coast Pet

Posts Tagged ‘secrets to dog training’

When you first set out to teach your pet dog or puppy to come, there are a few tips and tricks that Im going to share with you, to make it more successful!

I have adapted these free techniques from the outstanding ‘Secrets to Dog Training‘ by Daniel Stephens. You can jump straight to it here if you want to read more.

“Come dog”

Firstly, and possibly the most crucial, is that you should never call your dog over if you are going to do something that he might class as ‘negative’ to him.. Some common examples are things such as tying him up, wetting him (if he doesnt like that!), telling him off, smacking, hitting or generally disciplining him..

Never command your dog to come, then punish him for things like running away when he comes over. Your dog might think he is getting punished for obeying you.If the dog already knows bad associations when you call come, such as thinking it means 'run asap!' or if he has started to ignore it, you might have to try a new command that means 'come' but sounds different. 

Forget your old come command and teach this exercise using a new, clear word. ‘Here’ is a popular one, as is 'oi', but you can make up any command that suits you or that you think your dog might respond to.

In the ideal case, your dog should hear your command, cease what hes doing and sit in front of you! Best results are had when you treat this step as two different exercises.

The two processes can be taught seperate till the dog has them both mastered, when this happens you can bring them together.

“Come sit in front of me”

Start with putting your dog on a short ish leash. With a treat ready, get your pets attention and hold up the treat at nose neight while taking 4 steps backwards.

With your dog infront of you, now stop and hold the treat up so that your dog sits and waits.

Command your dog to sit and if and when he does, reward him with the treat, by lowering it to his mouth. Dont reward him if he jumps to get it!

Next time round try the process holding you place instead of moving backwards. Try to eliminate the treat part of the exercise, and change to a reinforcing command. This helps your dog to accept praise as a reward.

You can read part two of this article, for free, as my website (that has hundreds of other free dog training tips) here, at dog commands.

The biggest secret to dog training is understanding the method of positive conditioning. All that’s really necessary after that is patience and consistency. Most problems in training a dog stem from not understanding conditioning or from not applying it consistently.

To utilise it consistently, you will need lots of patience. You need to understand the levels of time needed to train a dog. You must also understand that being consistent doesn’t just mean during a short training session but whenever you and anyone else are interacting with your dog. This means that you also need your family members and anyone who interacts with your dog to be consistent also.

Positive conditioning means that a positive reinforcement i.e. an enjoyable stimulus when your dog does some action will encourage him to perform that particular action again. It’s a sad fact that many owners positively reinforce problem behaviors in their dogs without being aware of it. For example, they enter the house, the dog is jumping up on them and they give affection to the dog. They are positively reinforcing their dog to jump up on people without realising it.

If you ever watch the Dog Whisperer on TV, you will see that even though the families have watched his program, maybe even read his books and know intellectually what they should do, they still reward all sorts of unwanted behavior without realising it. The Dog Whisperer is very different which is why the dogs behave differently with him. He behaves consistently and ignores the dog if it’s doing unwanted behaviors. In virtually every case that he helps, most of the problems start with inconsistency on the part of the owner.

Lots of awareness and self-discipline are needed to stop yourself giving affection to a misbehaving dog. You also need to be aware that any attention, even when it’s shouting at your dog “stop barking”, may act as a positive reinforcement. So, the best response to unwanted behaviors in your dog may be to ignore them by turning away from your dog and giving no attention.

It’s more effective to focus on reinforcing positive behaviors rather than focusing on using negative reinforcement for unwanted behaviors. As the dog is encouraged more and more in positive behaviors, less time will be given by him to negative behaviors which go unrewarded.

Obviously, you may have to stop your dog doing unwanted behaviors For example, if he jumps on the food counter, you can just pull him off.

How do you positively reinforce behaviors you want to encourage? Possible rewards are tasty treats, affection or a toy to play with. Using small tasty treats is probably the easiest method. The treat needs to be given as close in time to the action as possible. Because of the importance of timing, the use of a clicker makes the reward process clearer to your dog. The clicker sound is used to mark the behavior precisely as it happens and the treat comes immediately afterwards. I encourage you to look more into the whole subject of clicker training since it does streamline process of positive reinforcement.

Read more about the Secrets to Dog Training, about clicker training with dogs and about dealing with dog behavior problems in general.