Dog Training: Free Yourself From Being Stressed By Your Badly Behaved Dog

Is your dog’s bad behavior causing you stress? Don’t put it off any longer. It’s time to begin some consistent obedience training for your dog. This means you need to be persistent and consistent with your training. However, make sure your training is always fun or your dog may get bored!

The Basic Needs of A Dog

Having a dog is a responsibility. If you don’t provide your dog’s basic needs, don’t be surprised if you have a badly behaved  or neurotic dog. What are the basic needs? Here are the main ones:

• food and water
• regular daily exercise
• company and social interaction
• an environment which stimulates him.

The main point in dog training is to adopt positive and negative reinforcement. When your dog engages in a behavior that is desired, you should reward him with a treat or affection. It’s crucial that the reward comes immediately after the desired action or the two things will not be connected by the dog.

It’s best to concentrate on positive reinforcement for desired behaviors rather than negative reinforcement for undesired behaviors. This has been found to be a more efficient way of training.

Physical punishment is not productive or humane way to train dogs and will only lead to your dog being neurotic and fearful. That’s not going to be a good relationship between man and dog. You can say a firm “No” in a growling tone of voice to stop him behaving badly. Perhaps most effective is to ignore your dog when he misbehaves. Dogs crave attention and if you ignore him – that will be negative reinforcement in itself.

An important aspect of training is to understand that a dogs is a dog, not a human being. Don’t humanize him. It will help you to do this if you study dog communication and the dynamics of a dog pack. You read about what their body language means: the position of the tail, the mouth positions, the ear position and the sounds they make.

Another important aspect of training is to position yourself as the pack leader. If your dog is pack leader, he is never going to be well-behaved for you because he thinks you are one of his pack. Some advice on positioning yourself up as pack leader:
-eat a some food in front of your dog as he waits for his food. The alpha dog always eats first.
-don’t allow him to get on the sofa or bed. The pack leader sleeps on higher ground.
-make sure you go through doors before your dog.

This is an introduction to some important points in dog training. I recommend you look into the most systematic of training methods: clicker training.