Please Don’t Teach Your Dog This Way

Nearly every dog owner wants to teach their dog properly. However, nearly an equal number seriously miscalculate the amount of time and discipline it takes to teach a dog. This results in a common set of misjudgments that are often made that could, with more or less effort, be completely evaded.

Dogs should not be thought of as hairy kids. Even though the typical dog has the intellectual development of a two year old child, there are more contrasts than similarities. While dogs are amazing at processing language, they are unable to reason as humans do. They can’t connect cause and effect the way humans do.

That is why plenty of new dog trainers are extremely frustrated when they suppose the dog is ignoring their command, which is being repeated again and again. Many owners consider a dog to be stubborn on one day when he obeyed his master’s commands the previous day. But the owners do not take into consideration that the dog does not understand the command so he does not know how to respond.

Some dogs probably would be called headstrong if they were people. However, they can be thrown off easily or fail to put together the command of “sit” today with yesterday’s behavior and subsequent reward. There are some feasible explanations for this 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.

Remember that patience means that you control your temper when what you actually want is to lash out physically. It’s normal to think about taking the easy route of physical punishment as the first reaction for correcting the dog’s behavior. On the other hand, this should be reserved for only the most serious situations. The dog doesn’t really grasp why they’re being smacked. This will not result in trust and confidence, but to the contrary fear.

Never the less, dogs are like people because they also will more readily listen to those that are trusted than those that are feared. They only follow those that they fear when they have no other option. But dogs make decisions very differently than humans do. They usually withstand any punishment they receive without actually learning from it. Corporal punishment is not a practical way of training.

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.

If you follow these ways, you are just going to have a totally maladjusted dog, and are going to be extremely unhappy with the results. So change YOUR behavior now instead of trying incorrectly to make the dog change its behavior.