Dog obedience training is a crucial part of your relationship with your dog. A well trained dog is a credit to you as the owner and will give your pet confidence in social situations and help him fit into the structure of your family. So all dogs should receive some kind of training and many people opt to do it themselves. This makes sense from a financial sense as proper lessons can be expensive. It is also less of a commitment when you are doing the training yourself as you can do it when you want or at weekends. However many people are less than successful in the training partly because the inherent flexibility of doing it yourself equates to unfocused training or because they fail to do enough research into dog training methods.
This article will list five common traps that people fall into when embarking on obedience training their dog. 1.As I alluded to in the introduction, the biggest cause of failure is not being committed. I guess this is hardly a revelation as lacking commitment in anything new that you are doing will result in a lack of success. Staying committed is about focusing on what motivated you in the first place and being disciplined.
Reinforce in your mind the original reason you started to train your pet. Think of the enjoyment your will get from being able to interact with your dog at a deeper level than just throwing the ball. Think of the peace of mind that will come when you know that your dog will behave in a variety of social situations. Committed also means keeping the desire to learn.
Read up about the breed of your pet. Find out what methods work well or what the dog is best suited to. Don't give up learning about the breed of dog. This will benefit your connection with the dog, inspire you to come up with new routines and make the training process easier.
2.Not being consistent. This will happen when you bore with teaching the same thing repeatedly and want to move onto something new.
You have to go at your dogs pace, not yours. You have to consistently repeat the command until your pet has it down to a tee. Keep it simple and straightforward to begin. Importantly, you should never move onto another command until you know that the dog understands the one you are teaching. Your dog will also get bored at times so don't make your session too long.
3.Teaching commands with negative reinforcement as opposed to positive reinforcement. Never punish a dog for not doing a command or understanding what you want. Cruelty has not place in dog obedience training and it will confuse your pet. Pain is not a good teaching philosophy and will lead to worse behavioral problems than better.
There is little doubt that positive reinforcement by giving treats and positive feedback to the dog is the best way to go. If you adopt this strategy, your dog will want to do things for you and enjoy the process, this will improve the training. 4. Not Being flexible to new ideas. Don't fix on one method just because it was endorsed by such and such or because it worked for your friend.
All tips and techniques are merely guidelines for your training process. Again, just like humans, each dog will have his own pace of learning and enjoy different methods. As you work with your pet you will begin to understand what works and what doesn't work. 5.
Strive to get a balance between keeping the training interesting but stay consistent. Avoid making the training too predictable and dull. Think of things that can spice it up from time to time. This will always depend on how your dog responds to new environments but why not try moving to different locations for the training.
Maybe try a touch of playing before the lesson begins and then keep the lesson short. Mix the peripheral things up but try to keep the core one command per lesson consistent.
Learn more about dog training and health tips, including a review of popular dog training course sit stay fetch and dog health care advice and information.