Dog Training
What are the most important things to consider, when training a dog? That’s the question that a lot of dog owner ask themselves when they are at the beginning of the dog training stage. Every single dog needs to be trained obedience at some point in life. Therefore it is an important question to be asking yourself what you have to consider when start training your dog.
The first thing we need to understand is that we communicate using our human perception and understanding of communication. We talk to the dog and we expect the dog to straight away understand what we are trying to communicate. Unfortunately that is not the case. We need to understand that the dog’s perception of communication is totally different to the human values we have while communicating. Once we realize that, we will have more realistic expectation of the dog, especially in the beginning stage of the training progress.
You can compare dog modification training to learning a new language. Your dog is in the process of learning a complete new language which the dog has never heard before. It's important to consider that the process is going involve a steep learning curve, and as time progresses it will become easier for the dog to pick up things more quickly. There are certain things you should absolutely avoid during this process of communication development. Anything that involves yelling at the dog, screaming, or some kind of violent communication will dramatically affect the results when training your dog. These things are unnecessary attributes during the time of training.
Another important factor that you should consider is that the dog is being trained by and the same person throughout the whole dog behavior modification program. This will ensure consistency and safe boundaries for the dog to develop healthy behavioral patters. Dogs will read into the differences in the tone of your voice, which is very confusing for the dog. It’s also very important that the trainer implements a way of praising the dog with a lot of enthusiasm during the session, this is essential in the development of the dog.
A way to improve results when training a dog is by having short training sessions. At the beginning of the process I would recommend that you start of with session no longer then 2-3 minutes. After a while you can increase the amount of time during a training session to a maximum of 10 minutes. It is also important that you finish every session with a skill that the dog has already mastered previously. When teaching new skills I would recommend to only move on to the next new skill once the other skill is fully mastered. Keep in mind that when doing this training there should be opportunity for enough repetition and space for lots of praise during the sessions. This will hopefully develop a fruitful relationship and should dramatically improve results.
Find out here, which are the basics things when doing basic dog training.