Dog Training - Stop the Begging!

Tastes among humans differ, but one thing is constant: your dog will eat just about anything off the table you give it. That may be fine when it’s just you and the family. But when you have guests over, it can be embarrassing. Here are some tips for how to get pooch to stay away during meal time.

The first step is not to start a bad habit.

Dog’s have a natural hierarchy with the alpha at the top, followed by the beta, and so on. In the wild, the alpha eats first, then food is shared by the rest - once the alpha ‘gives permission’. Permission can be denied with a growl or a snap of the teeth.

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Dog Training - Housebreaking Your Puppy

No training is more basic for pet owners than that first important lesson: Do it outside!

Teaching your pet to eliminate outside the home, not in it, usually starts between six and eight weeks of age. Dogs as young as four weeks have been started on the program, but at that age few have the muscular control to succeed.

Like any dog training regimen, trainer patience is as important as the dog’s temperament. ‘Sit’, ’stay’ and other behaviors can often be learned in a few days. ‘Potty’ training typically takes weeks - sometimes as short as two, often a month or more.

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Dog Training - Specialized Training: Service Dogs

And you thought normal dog training was difficult. Sit, stay, down, come, heel… all require weeks or more of dedicated trainer and dog effort to master. Now, consider the months or years needed to train a police, search and rescue, guide or other service dog.

Training these special animals starts with careful selection. It’s no accident that certain breeds - German Shepherds, Golden Retrievers and others - tend to be selected. Others may be just as loving as pets, but don’t usually have the physical characteristics nor temperament needed to carry out the wide range of complex behavior these working dogs perform.

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Dog Training - How NOT To Train Your Dog

Most dog owners sincerely want to train their dog well. But an almost equal number will underestimate the time and effort it takes to do so. The result is frequently a common set of mistakes that can be, with more or less effort, avoided.

Dogs are not furry children. Though the average mature dog has a mental development somewhere around the level of a human two year old, there are more differences than there are similarities. Dogs can be amazing at processing language. But they don’t reason the way humans do. They don’t connect cause and effect in the same way.

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Dog Training - No, YOU Sit!

Dogs can learn an amazing variety of behaviors, but few so fundamentally important as the ’sit’. Beyond the basic need to establish that the human of the pair is the alpha (leader), it has a number of practical benefits.

When a dog sits he’s more attentive, making it easier to follow further commands. His eyes are on you, the alpha.

As important as what the dog is doing, is what he is not. In a sit, he’s more or less stationary. There are still those wagging tails, after all. That means he’s not chasing the cat, knocking over the furniture, running through the garden or out into the street.

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Dog Training - Training Styles - Part II

Training styles differ, but some traditional techniques have proven their worth.

Training styles are sometimes divided into those that use both positive and negative reinforcement, or rewards and punishment and those that rely solely on rewards. Using the word ‘punishment’ naturally turns off many who want to treat their companion with care. Substitute the word with ‘discouragements’ and you have the more accurate sense.

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Dog Training - The Basics

Though dog-human interaction goes back thousands of years, communication between the two is still sometimes rough. The human half of the pair is usually the smarter party, but watching the usual training sessions one can have legitimate reason to wonder.

Dogs understand and respond at roughly the mental level of a human two-year-old, but there the similarity ends. Their senses operate differently - their color vision has a different response pattern to reds and greens, for example, and obviously their noses are infinitely more sensitive - and their minds process information differently as well. Anyone training dogs has to take this into account in order to avoid human frustration and canine misbehavior.

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Dog Training - No, YOU Down!

‘Nature to be commanded, must be obeyed’ said Francis Bacon. Nowhere more true than dog training. Dogs have a natural tendency to seek and adhere to a hierarchy with an alpha (leader) at the top on down to an omega at the bottom. ‘Down’ is one effective technique for enforcing your alpha status.

It also has practical benefits. When a dog is in the ‘down’ position, it isn’t knocking over the furniture or small children. It also leads naturally to subsequent behaviors such as ‘rollover’, ‘crawl’ and other keen tricks.

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Dog Training - Training Styles - Part I

Contrary to popular belief, there are not as many training styles as there are trainers. Despite individual differences, people handling dogs fall into clearly recognizable categories. And no matter your individual style or that of your dog, there remain certain truisms.

The Too-Easily Frustrated

No activity apart from human childrearing requires as much patience as developing cooperative behavior in a dog. And most individuals don’t spontaneously possess that much. So, along with training the dog, self-training is usually necessary.

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Dog Training - No, YOU Stay!

Dogs have a significant capacity for training their trainers. Apart from making us wave our hands and bark odd words, we regularly fetch treats and run after tennis balls. Not useful to us, but the dog enjoys it.

To put things back the way they’re meant to be, assert your alpha status. One of the foremost methods is a frequent use of ‘the stay’. Just what it sounds like, the stay requires the dog to remain stationary, in place, while you move about. Just the reverse of the usual situation in too many cases.

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