We love our dogs and our dogs love us too. They rush to greet us when we get back home. They are one of our best companion who listens to our endless talks, provide cuddle when we need a hug and go for walk with us. However, often their enthusiastic or bad behaviors like jumping, digging holes, dashing out the door or licking our face become frustrating and troublesome.Training can be a way to make our dog even better companions. It allows us to bond with them and even more enjoy our time with our dog. However, training requires lots of time and dedication from us to develop proper behavior among our dogs. It takes almost 10 weeks for our dogs to learn new command and slower dogs require even more.
Providing obedience training to dogs is a necessity. It helps to prevent the occurrence of behavioral problems and solve the existing bad behaviors among our dogs. Obedience training is focused on training dogs to be obedient to our commands such as sit, stay, come, down, heel, or retrieve. It is a clear and concise method of communicating to our dogs what is expected of them and gaining insight about what our dogs are proficient at.
Training session should be happy and fun times where along with learning there must be a bonding time. It doesn’t matter if the four-legged friend we adopted is a small pup or an old dog, we can provide them obedience training at any age. But, commands used must be consistent and short because that makes easy to understand and learn for our dogs. Every dog’s personality is different from other, some respond to tenderness and coaxing, and others need a strong tone of voice. While training our dogs we need to gather information on a variety of methods and identify the best one that works for our dog and us.
Few reinforcement techniques you can use to accelerate the learning process of your dog’s obedience training are:
Positive Reinforcements based Training
Over the year various techniques have been used but positive reinforcement or reward system has been popular among dog owners and trainers. There is a belief that “dogs learn good behavior by being rewarded for performing well”. It helps them to understand what is wanted in their actions and manners, and help to maintain the spirit of your dogs. Praise, hand signals, treats, toys, and clickers are often used as positive reinforcements to implant good behaviors, correct bad behaviors or teach new tricks. The idea behind it is to give rewards each time they obey the command and you need to give them rewards as soon as your dogs successfully obey.
Punishment based Training
Also known as aversive obedience training. This type of training can be used to correct the negative and unsatisfactory behavior of dogs either by adding physical pressure or adding corrections for certain behaviors. The term punishment might seem harsh, but it’s only correcting the behaviors and ensuring that they will not be praised for their disobedience or wrong doings. Using time outs can be something that can help to provide positive reinforcement through punishment for dogs who are not cooperating. There are other punishment methods such as lease correction, ear pinch, alpha rolls, shaking, loud horns, spraying water or loud horn that your dog’s dislikes. Such punishment should only be used when your dog’s actions are beyond what they have been trained to do. Since, it can cause loss of trust, encourage aggression or injure your dogs if not implemented correctly.
You can combine both positive reinforcement and punishment while training your dogs. The main motive behind training them is to make them disciplined. Whatever method used, keep the likes and dislikes of your dogs in mind and make the sessions as fun and interactive as possible.