Do Not Teach Your Dog This Way!

By Ira Nelson

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

Dogs are definitely not furry babies and children. Even though an average dog has an IQ of a 2-year-old human child, there are fewer similarities and more differences between dogs and humans. A dog does not understand reasoning, cause and effect, and processing language systematically.

This can end up being extremely frustrating as the same command is repeated over and over, and the dog seems to reject the commands. ususally it is not rejecting the command; it is likely that they don't understand it. It seems it should be clear as a bell because they've displayed the proper behavior many times before, but today they are being headstrong.

Many times, humans are surprised at dogs acting stubbornly. But their pet may have failed to associate yesterday's rewards for obeying the call, "come" with today's "come" because he did not connect the two in his mind. Some possible reasons and explanations based on how dogs learn have been suggested.

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.

Physical retaliation and venting your frustration upon a dog is definitely not a good response. It is going to make the dog afraid of you instead of correcting its behavior. Physical punishment should only be kept for meting out in extreme circumstances. A dog does not understand why he is being punished physically. This punishment is going to make your dog fear instead of trust you.

Never the less, dogs are like humans because they also will more readily seek to please those that are trusted than those that are feared. They only follow those that they fear when they have no other choice. But dogs make decisions very differently than humans do. They usually endure 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.

These methods are completely useless and are going to result in a frustrated dog owner and an unstable and fearful pet. So, to make sure that you do not get these results, change YOUR behavior before you try changing your dog's behavior. - 31866

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