The Essential Elements of Dog Training

Training your dog is an important step at the start of your dogs life to ensure proper behavior, or later in life to correct bad habits. Before you seriously begin training, try to do a little research on your dog’s breed to determine if there are any bred personality traits or specific little quirks that the breed might possess that would influence training methods.

Training your dog humanely is the key to establishing a healthy relationship with your dog. This means that during the training phase you reward good behaviors and ignore and/or correct bad ones.

You should never use physical violence, “choke chains” or other pain inducing methods to correct a behavior. Repeated use of physical force can cause a dog to become extremely skittish around all people and afraid of its master. Using a stern voice, withholding a reward, and physically relocating a dog painlessly can all cause the desired training effect without physically hurting the dog.

The most common training commands – sit, stay, heel, come and leash walking are easily taught through incentive (reward based) learning. This early learning can be important, since otherwise a dog might develop bad habits that will be significantly harder to unlearn later on. A dog with a strongly developed sense of independence is less likely to learn since he’s become used to getting his own way too often. When possible, teach your dog basic commands early to avoid this sort of problem in the future.

Remember, your dog does want to please you. With a little patience and a lot of consistency, it’s not that hard to teach dogs what behaviors you like and what definitely isn’t allowed. Working from a position of confident leadership you will quickly establish yourself as the leader of the pack and have a well behaved, happy dog to show for it. Maintaining cruel but humane leadership will help ensure that your dog will be able to learn from it’s mistakes.

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