When you begin to train your own dog you might have a lot of questions at first. Let’s start with talking about positive reinforcement. Postive reinforcement is using treats and rewards when your dog behaves in desirable ways. A great place to way to start using this is with a clicker and treats. Any time the dog does something you feel is a positive behavior you can make a noise (click) and give him or her a treat. This begins the association of a postive reward for a desired action.
The reward doesn’t have to be in the form of a treat though. The reward can also be in the form of attention. For this to work, you want to start with a clear plan in your mind. For example if you want the dog to stop jumping up on you when you come home. Encourage the dog to NOT jump on you in a controlled environment and reward your dog for said behavior. Now introduce more variables gradually being sure to reward him or her when they DON’T jump.
Good communication
A great place to start with this is to have a good bond with your dog. You want to be sure that you have a dog that pays attention to your commands. Start with your dog in an open place like a park and be sure to give lots of attention and grab your dogs attention before you give him or her commands. Building trust and good communication with your dog is the first step in having a well behaved dog.
A great way to bond is to challenge your dog with mental stimulation and games. Be sure to play games that challenge your dog. Dogs need mental stimulation the same as people. Be sure that in addition to regular food that you spend time building trust through playing games. Fetch, tag, agility challenges are great ways to do this. Be sure to build the trust slowly and go at the dogs pace. It’s much better to build things like learning games slowing.
Have fun with it
Think of it like this. Your dog is at a certain skill level with games and knowing things now. Never expect anything more than a 10% improvement in any one area. Set goals for what games you’d like to play and how many words you and your dog can communicate with each other. How many words does your dog know when you talk? That is your ‘rate of communication’. Now you have a baseline for ‘how much you play’, ‘what is your communication proficiency’.
Now just keep track. The best way to train a dog is to be sure that you are trained and consistent in the behaviors that cause your dog to be trained. Track every day how often you play with your dog and walk him/her. How many words does your dog know.
Express love and forgiveness and keep it fun. Making training a fun experience for you and your dog, well. That is just a better life. But also you are more likely to stick with it. Things and activities that people find rewarding they are more likely to stick with. So be sure to enjoy the process of training your dog. Play games with him or her and expect to be patient in training yourself and your dog. Setting an intention for gentle and consistent small improvements is much better for long term growth than setting large and confusing and unattainable goals.
The best positive reinforcement is praise and love. It’s a great way to bond and it never makes your dog fat!
Prevention
The best way to good behavior is to not tempt your dog into bad behavior. Put things that are a temptation to misbehave out of reach and be sure to know your dog and know what tempts him or her. Exercise is the biggest need that animals have outside of the food, shelter ones. Taking your dog for walks and playing is the number one way you can improve behavior. Dogs need outdoor time and play time. Love and attention.
Ignore negative behavior when possible. If the dog is attention seeking behavior can be ignored and it’s not actively destructive, then it’s better to just have an absence of attention for the dog when it misbehaves. Be careful to not reward attention seeking behavior or negative behaviors with food and love. Just because a dog has your attention does not mean you should give him the attention treat or food treat.
Interupt commands
Interrupt commands allow you to signal to your dog that what they are doing is bad and should stop. These work great with redirection. No. Don’t chew that. But instead this is a great object to chew. To be honest, from a dogs perspective I can totally see how both objects look the same to chew on. It’s only our delegation of one object as bad and another as good that marks it so. My yoga blocks look the same to a dog that needs to chew on things as the dog chew toys. Just be sure to be patient and keep communicating with your dog. You can not expect your dog to know automatically which things are good to chew on.
Socialize your dog
Be sure to socialize your dog with other dogs and people. The more you social your dog the more you run into scenarios that you understand you need to figure out on how you’d like to train your dog. What do you do if the dog jumps on people? Tries to take other dogs toys? Decides to chase a squirrel suddenly? It’s better to find out these things in small increments and come up with a strategy.
Conclusion
Building a relationship with your dog requires time, patience, and good communication. It’s tempting to ignore them or expect them to obey commands that we think we are making clear. But in order for us to change our dogs behavior we have to first change our own.