Why It’s Important to Teach Your Dog to Listen

Training your dog is among the most important aspects of your pet’s life. Can you imagine living for ten years or more with an untrained animal? This article can help you learn more about the importance of dog training.

Understanding the underlying motivations to your dog’s behaviour is crucial to successful training. Dog training can be a learning experience, especially with it comes to determining what motivates your pet. Whatever your goals, your dog’s training routine should include variety and plenty of positive reinforcement. If you keep him happy and motivated, he will not disappoint you.

Your family must be trained to be consistent with commands for your dog. If you use different commands for each action, like using “down” and your wife using “lay,” your dog will get confused. Consistency in the command phrases will make training easier on everyone in the family, including your dog.

When training your puppy, avoid tug-of-war type games. Games, such as wrestling, chasing or tugging, teaches the puppy to nip or bite at your hands. You want to avoid having your puppy become accustomed to this behaviour, so it is better to postpone these games until the dog is more mature and fully trained.

Anxiety causes destructive chewing. Placing the dog in a safe environment such as a dog crate and providing a chew toy keeps the dog safe and occupied until your return.

Make sure you are consistent when you train your dog. Write down the specific commands you want to use with your dog, and get everyone in your household to review the list and use the same words. You also need to make certain that everyone should be rewarding the dog’s good behaviour and not rewarding any bad behaviour. Your dog will become very confused if each person responds differently to a single type of behaviour. This will make training very hard.

Dogs have a short attention span and you will have to attract his attention. If you get your dog to focus on you, it will help his behaviour.

Do not try to train your dog if you do not feel you can be patient. Be patient when training your puppy, so you can both stay focused.

Do not give up when you are trying to train your dog. Your dog requires consistent reinforcement of training, or he may quickly forget what he has learned. Just as you need to keep feeding and sheltering your dog, training is a never-ending process.

Communication between you and your dog is key to successful dog training. Obviously, your dog needs to know what you are asking of him. Your verbal commands and body language, along with the rewards you give out, should all be consistent. Also pay attention to the communication your dog is giving back to you as that will affect your training routine. He will let you know if he is having a good day or if he is feeling anxious and overworked.

Having been said before, getting a dog trained will be a great investment. A dog that is not well trained and misbehaves can cause havoc in your home. It can destroy your items, stress family members out, and even alienate itself to the point where nobody wants to have it around. Listening to the information provided in the article, you could make it a choice to have a great a loveable dog.