How to Train a Dog - General Considerations 2

Puppy Training

In the former paragraph I mentioned three "goals" for educating your dog. Priorities change over the lifetime of your dog. With a puppy the establishing mutual trust and respect has the highest priority. You achieve this by being consistent. Consistency means that a specific behaviour of your dog is always followed by the same consequence.

As an example if your dog wants to chew your shoes he's always stopped to do so. Always! And if your dog responds to a command from you he's always rewarded. No exceptions. That's what consistency means.

From this you can imagine that it's best to take a vacation as long as possible when bringing a new puppy home and stay around it all the time.

How to Train a Dog to Stop

This is another thing you have to start with as soon as you have your new dog at home. The secret here is to stop the unwanted behaviour and channel it to an accepted one. Puppies are used to explore their environment with their teeth. So it's quite normal for a puppy to chew on shoes and furniture and what not.

Distract your puppy with a sharp "No" or "Off" and offer her something more interesting like a toy or a chewing article like a dried chicken neck.

Watch out that your dog doesn't make it the game of doing something forbidden is rewarded. With a puppy the risk isn't very high but with elder dogs this is what normally happens. In this case you should make the unwanted behaviour more repellent.

I'm not talking about physical punishment. What I use is a throwing chain which lands in the vicinity of the dog when she does something forbidden. Since the chain is a small one it can't hurt the dog even if she's hit. But it scares her from what she's doing.

There are other methods which I'm not going into here.

How to Train a Dog to do

After having established mutual trust and respect and have educated your dog to behave well to do training will cover the most time. Puppy training is more or less a preparation of what's to come.

I am not going over specific training here like how to train a dog to walk on a leash. I'm rather covering general aspects which are common to whatever training you have in mind.

If the action you want from your dog is simple like sit or lay you can go right into the training. If the action is a complex one e.g. sending your dog over a hurdle to fetch something and bring it back over the hurdle you have to break this down to simple actions like jumping over the hurdle, sending him over the hurdle, retrieving etc.

Now even before introducing a command you have to bring your dog to show the required action. There are different methods for different actions which I'm not going to cover here. General rule here is: let the dog find out as much as possible for himself but give help before he gets frustrated. Your fantasy is asked for here and of course thorough knowledge of your dog.

If you get the wanted reaction praise your dog and reward with treats or playing. Repeat and reinforce by praise and reward. If your dog seems to understand start accompanying the action with your command. On the repetitions give the command more and more towards the start of the action until the command triggers the action.

Now you are done.