When Teaching Your Dog, Don’t Do It This Way
Tuesday, 10. November 2009
It is the ambition of every dog owner to have a well-trained dog. However, many dog owners do not take into account the amount of effort and time which is needed to train a dog properly. That is the reason why a number of mistakes are made which could be easily avoided with a little bit of common sense and effort.
Dogs are definitely not furry children as some owners consider them to be. An average dog is going to have the mental capacity of a human 2-year-old, but there are not as many similarities as differences between a human and the dog. Dogs cannot follow language processing or reasoning like human beings. In the same manner, they do not understand cause and effect.
That is the reason why people get frustrated when they repeat the same command a number of times and the dog does not seem to comprehend it. In 98% of the cases the dog does not understand it, and that is why it is not necessarily ignoring that particular command. One should understand that, because it is possible that they responded to that command before but not on this particular occasion.
That is the reason why owners dub a dog stubborn or disobedient as if it was human. A dog might get distracted while training or not relate the “come” command with the behavior of the previous training session and its resulting reward. There are reasons for this particular behavior.
A dog trainer is going to need a lot of patience. You will need to repeat those commands continuously and again and again. Be ready not to get 100% results every time. Many dogs need more than 2 years of training to get past the simple basic and easy to understand commands.
Physical retaliation and venting your frustration upon a dog is definitely not a good response. It is going to make the dog afraid of you instead of correcting its behavior. Physical punishment should only be kept for meting out in extreme circumstances. A dog does not understand why he is being punished physically. This punishment is going to make your dog fear instead of trust you.
Dogs are just like human beings in the way that they follow people they trust instead of the people they fear. Following a person they fear is a last resort option for dogs. Dogs also have different reasoning abilities than humans. They are not going to learn from physical punishment, because they do not understand the reason behind it. That is why physical punishment is not an effective training option.
Some points about How Not to train your dog: – Talking to the dog as if it is a human and not an animal with a different nature than yours. – Believing that a dog has reasoning abilities to connect events across circumstances and times and coming to the same result as you. – Punishing them because they are not behaving the way you expect them to behave.
Follow these altogether ineffective methods and you’ll end up with a messed up dog and you will be an unhappy owner. But if this isn’t the outcome you are looking for, be prepared to change YOUR behavior, before you try to change the behavior of the dog.
Learn to pick the right Dog Bedding for your dog. Don’t allow Puppy Potty Training become a prolonged or tedious experience.