Many pet parents are eager to start training their dogs, but most dogs aren’t well trained. Why?
Most people give up training because they break one or more of these dog training rules.
- Keep training sessions short! It’s better to do 10 3 minute training sessions than one half-hour session each day. Dogs can easily lose patience and concentration, and you will grow frustrated too.
- Only train when you are in a good mood. We all had that grumpy teacher when we were in school. Was that a good environment for learning? No. So why would we give that same experience to our dogs?
- Always end training on a good note. If you end the training on a failure, thats what the dog remembers. Always end the training with the dog getting success and lots of praise.
- Make it easy for your dog. Start easy with very few distractions before moving on to harder things. Imagine they tried teaching your calculus in kindergarden. It would be too hard and you’d give up on schooling. Same rule applies to our dog. Start easy and slowly move up in difficulty. Ideal training regiment is one that your dog never fails.
- Only positive reward based training! Hitting your kids so they learn the alphabet is stupid, cruel and ineffective. So why would we do it to our dogs? Punishing and scaring our dogs while trying to train them will only lead them to fear and resent training. That is the opposite of what we want to happen. We want out dogs to get excited when we are about to start training.
