Dog Training Advice
Before you begin training your dog I want you to make a clear, unbiased decision about how you are going to train it.
There are two quite distinct ways to train animals; one is what I refer to as the Mary Chipperfield style and the other, the Motivation style. In essence, you can beat a dog with a stick until it does what you want it to do - out of fear - during which it will be pushed further and further into its natural instincts of defense (don’t then wonder why your dog has bitten you….) or you can base your training style on how animals actually learn.
The important thing to remember is that dogs aren’t born with the capability to understand English (or Spanish, Japanese etc). They have to be taught what we mean. Whilst dogs are experts at reading body language (which is a large part of the way dogs communicate), they’re no more adept at reading human minds as humans are! When you put these two facts together, it becomes clear that half the time when we think our dog knows what we want, it’s just guessing it’s way through.
It’s simple to overcome this communication barrier by simply understanding that dogs repeat behaviours that are reinforced or rewarded. So, in order to change behaviour, all we have to do is identify what’s reinforcing the bad behaviour, remove that reinforcement and instead reward and alternative appropriate/desired behaviour.
So, if you have a dog that jumps up at you it’s because it wants attention. Jumping up gets attention. Even if we push the dog down or shout “no!”, it’s getting attention… which is better than being bored and alone. So, we have to withdraw attention from the dog when it jumps up (remove the reinforcement of the bad behaviour) and instead reward an alternative behaviour such as sitting. When the dog sits, we immediately praise and reward him. The dog then thinks: “Hmmm, sitting here gets me much more and much better attention - I’ll just do this in the future!”.
The key to success is rewarding the behaviour as it occurs or immediately after. You need to watch your dog to ensure you catch the desired behaviour and ca reinforce it with reward and praise. One mistake many owners make is to constantly talk to the dog, giving it lots of distracting information or moving their arms around a lot giving lots of different gestures and further confusion to the dog. Dogs focus more on visual cues than verbal ones so once the desired behaviour has been taught then you can teach the cue you’d like to use (IE: “sit”).
And all of this without so much as touching the dog let alone shouting at it, electrocuting it, “alpha rolling” it, strangling it or spraying it. You can choose which type of training you wish to use. I hope you use one that is safe, kind, fun and positive… which just so happens to be the method that is quick and easy!
a helpful mobile guide about training and correcting problem behaviours is available on my iPhone app, Dog Trainer Pro, available from the appstore.
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Posted in Jez's top training tips by admin
