Talk with your Animals

Training your dog is an important step at the start of your dogs life to ensure proper behavior, or later in life to correct bad habits. Before training starts it is best to research the dog’s breed(s) to get an idea of its personality ingrained traits or any specific quarks the breed(s) may have when it comes to training.

Humane training is a necessity if you want to maintain a good relationship with your dog. Good behaviors need to be rewarded, while bad ones should be ignored or corrected.

Strong physical reprimands and devices such as choke chains can cause much more harm than good in the long run. Over time this can cause the dog to become skittish around people or lose the drive to please its owner. Humane corrections include using a stern voice, withholding rewards or physically moving the dog where it should go without hurting it.

The most common training commands – sit, stay, heel, come and leash walking are easily taught through incentive (reward based) learning. This early learning can be important, since otherwise a dog might develop bad habits that will be significantly harder to unlearn later on. A dog with a strongly developed sense of independence is less likely to learn since he’s become used to getting his own way too often. Because of this it can be more difficult to train older dogs on these basic commands.

Remember, your dog does want to please you. Therefore, it is important to be both patient and consistent with the behaviors you are willing to allow and those that you are not. Working from a position of confident leadership you will quickly establish yourself as the leader of the pack and have a well behaved, happy dog to show for it. Maintaining cruel but humane leadership will help ensure that your dog will be able to learn from it’s mistakes.

Taylor also writes on articles on dog bed selection such as large dog beds.