Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Positive Reinforcement Training for Your Dog in Easy Steps

By Danah Reed

There is no doubt about the importance of training your dog well, especially if you are looking for a long lasting and healthy relationship with the pet living in your house. This means that the basic rules must be lived by and training your dog to do certain things is important. More important however is the way you go about training your dog.

A dog is incredibly sensitive and learns quickly who the boss is in your home. If a dog is trained with harsh words, yelling and hitting then he will learn to fear you instead of love you. You want to establish a bond with your dog, so that your dog will trust you as a loving caregiver. If the dog expects you to react with anger and physical punishment then you cannot expect to have a loving relationship with a dog who wants to be your companion.

So negative attitudes will make your dog afraid and shy, but doing the complete opposite, training your dog with positive reinforcement will not only speed up the training process but it will also make it so much easier and pleasant. Once your dog is encouraged in a positive way, it will try and start pleasing you and work hard at doing anything you ask of him.

When using the positive reinforcement training you are putting the emphasis on all those tasks and things your dog does that you approve of and pass on giving him attention when he does something wrong.

Dogs perceive the lack of attention as a punishment in itself so whenever something does go wrong, just dont react to it. During training there are a lot of things that could go wrong, so instead of yelling or punishing your dog, you just dont pay attention to that mistake.

However, if you see your dog doing something you approve of and want him to do, make sure you give him a lot of affection and love for doing the right thing. This way your dog will start relating different actions with happy feelings and will start choosing to do those things that will get him that praise.

When using the positive reinforcement technique it is important to set your dog up for success so there is going to be plenty of praise.

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