Basics of Dog Training

It is essential for dog parents like you to know certain basic factors that determine your relationship with your dog and that can go a long way in training him effectively.

Before you begin training your dog, it is absolutely essential that you build a loving bond with him. This is important as it helps you to understand his needs and instincts and also allows your dog to have complete trust in you.

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How To Bond With Your Dog

Building a bond with your dog is the first and the most crucial step involved in training him successfully. As soon as you bring your dog home, you must first try to develop a caring and loving relationship with him in order to win his trust and confidence.

When dogs are secure in the knowledge that they belong to the family, they are more likely to respond better to their owners' training commands. Just like with any relationship, there must be mutual trust and respect between you and your dog.

Trust takes time to develop and respect comes from defining boundaries and treating any breach of those boundaries with firmness and fairness.

Without enforceable limitations, respect can’t be developed. And when there is no respect, building a bond with your dog is almost impossible.

4 Golden Rules To Building A Relationship With Your Dog :

Love Your Dog and He Will Love You Back!

Once you're successful in building a bond with your dog, you can rest assured that training him and teaching him new and clever tricks will be a cakewalk.

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How Your Dog Learns...

Your dog's learning period can be divided into five phases:

The Teaching Phase - This is the phase where you must demonstrate to your dog exactly what you want him to do.

The Practicing Phase - Practice makes Perfect. Once a lesson is learned, practice with your dog what you have just taught him.

The Generalizing Phase - Here you must continue practicing with your dog in different locations and in an environment with a few distractions. You can take your dog out for a walk, or to a nearby park and command him to practice whatever you've taught him.

Practicing the learned lessons in multiple locations and in the presence of small distractions will help him learn and retain lessons better.

The Testing Phase - Once you're sure that your dog has achieved almost 90% success....he responds correctly almost every time you give a command, you must start testing his accuracy in newer locations with a lot of distractions..

In all these phases, remember to  use positive reinforcement training techniques: every time your dog performs a command correctly, follow up with lots of praise. If you need to correct a behavior, remember to use the mildest form of correction, just enough to stop the unwanted behavior, and then follow with praise again.

Example: Take him to the local shopping mall and ask him to obey your command. He may not come up with the correct response the very first time you do this, but you must not lose hope. Dogs learn through repetition, so the more you practice, the better he will get!

The idea is to test your dog to see how he responds in an environment which is new to him. Set up a situation where you are in control of the environment and your dog.

There are only 2 possibilities:

Keep on testing until he succeeds. Follow the rule of the 3 Ps – patience, persistence, praise.

Internalizing Phase - Finally, comes the extremely rewarding phase where your dog does everything he is taught to do even without your commands! For example, if you command your dog to sit every time you stop at a corner to the cross the street, and praise him profusely when doing so, pretty soon he will begin offering this desired behavior all on his own.

Remember:

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Copyright (c) 2009 TrainPetDog.com

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