Dog Training Basics Lead to a Good Relationship

Since dogs don’t use language, our only means of communicating with our dogs in training, at least initially, is through rewards and punishments. To be effective our response to the dog’s behavior has to immediately follow the behavior or else we are failing to communicate as we intend. This is dog training basics tenet number one.

While dogs do have the capacity to understand some of our language, they do not have the concept of history that we do because their brains are not linguistically-oriented. We cannot reason with them verbally. It just will never work. The classic human mistake in this area is to punish a dog for a behavior hours after the event happened. They won’t connect the dots no matter what we say.

A frequent occurrence with young pups is a potty training accident. While your purpose is to communicate, “don’t relieve yourself in the house,” and you punish the pup hours after the dog had the accident, your dog has no hint as to what you’re carrying on about. This creates fear and confusion in the dog, who certainly does not understand your message.

Another primary tenet of dog training basics 101 is that if you want training to work, you have to catch your dog in the behavior. In terms of house training, you have to catch the pup when it is just about to squat and pick it up and take it outside. Then it learns where you want it to go to the bathroom.

As far as your relationship goes, it is far better to catch a dog being good and reward it than to catch it being bad and punish it. In order to catch your dog and communicate the desirability of a behavior, you should be watching your dog closely during training periods.

It is far better to focus on a single behavior in a particular training session (e.g., actions that are starting to resemble heeling) because that keeps your message simpler. Your dog can become clear about your goals at that moment. When you time your feedback to your dog carefully, you will experience a lot more success at training and alleviate any dog behavior problems.