Is your dog’s bad behavior causing you stress? Don’t put it off any longer. It’s time to get down to some consistent obedience training for your dog. This means you need to be persistent and consistent with your training. However, make sure your training is always fun or your dog may get bored!

What Are Your Dog’s Basic Need?

Having a dog is a responsibility. If you don’t provide your dog’s basic needs, you shouldn’t be surprised if you have a badly behaved  or neurotic dog. What are the basic needs? Here are the main ones:

• food and water
• regular exercise
• social interaction with dogs and people
• a stimulating environment.

The main point in dog training is to use positive and negative reinforcement. When your dog does a behavior that is wanted, you should reward him with a treat or affection. It’s crucial that the reward comes immediately after the desired behavior or the two things will not be connected by the dog.

It’s best to concentrate on positive reinforcement for desired behaviors rather than negative reinforcement for behaviors you want to stop. This has been found to be a more productive way of training.

Physical punishment is not an effective or humane way to train dogs and will only lead to your dog being neurotic and fearful. That’s not going to be a good relationship between man and dog. You can say a firm “No” in a growling tone of voice to stop him behaving badly. Perhaps most effective is to ignore your dog when he behaves badly. Dogs crave attention and being ignored is negative reinforcement enough.

You should learn to see your dog as a dog, not a human being. Dogs have their own way of communicating which you will not understand unless you study it. You read about what their body language means. They have various ways of communicating: with their tail, head position, ear position, mouth and teeth and vocally with various kinds of barks, growls and whines.

Being pack leader or alpha dog is vital if you want your dog to behave well. If your dog is the alpha dog, he is never going to be well-behaved for you because he thinks you are one of his pack. Some advice on setting yourself up as pack leader:
-eat a biscuit or two in front of your dog as he waits for his food. The alpha dog always eats first.
-don’t let him to onto the sofa or bed. The alpha dog sleeps on higher ground.
-don’t allow him to go through the door before you.

This is an introduction to some important points in dog training. I recommend you look into the most systematic of training methods: clicker training for dogs.

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