Rockwall Veterinary Hospital starts by saying, I don’t know a thing about you but I’ll bet that you would agree with me on this. Every dog owner would love their dogs to be obedient. Some dog owners achieve this with the help of a dog handler or even by themselves. But, unforunately, not all training are successful. Why? This is because, some things may have been overlooked. So, let’s talk about dog training and issues that are associated with the training.

There are many methods and techniques involved in training your pet dog. You should not just act like a boss and expect your pet dog to listen to you. You should try to achieve an understanding between you and your dog on order to train your pet dog . So, do not expect your dog to obey you at the very beginning.

So what are the first steps? Simple. For starters, you have to remember these three principles. They are: reinforcement, punishment and extinction. By understanding these three simple principles, you will be on your way to training your pet dog to be more obedient.

What exaclty is reinforcement? Reinforcement is the dog’s behavior towards the trainer. There are only two outcomes: the dog either behaves better or worse. Let us break reinforcement into 2 categories. They are: positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement.

Positive reinforcement is about giving rewards or praise. If your dog behaves or obeys you, then you reward or praise your pet. This good behavior remains because the dog understands it will be rewarded for as long as it listens to or behaves itself.

Negative reinforcement happens when the trainer removes an unpleasant situation to make the dog obey. An example of this is when you want to teach your dog to sit. I am sure your dog will not budge if tell it to sit. What you can do is that you can pressure on the collar and release the pressure once the dog obeys you.

We shall move on to the next principle; punishment. Again, we can categorize it into two categories; positive punishment or the negative punishment. A punishment is considered positive when the trainer punishes the dog and the outcome of it is a dog’s behavior turns out to be better. However, a negative punishment is when the trainer takes away something that the dog really likes or enjoys and the behavior is diminished or eliminated.

The third principle is about total elimination of a behavior. This is when behavior is not reinforced resulting to its extinction or elimination. For example, your pet dog is a constant whiner so you allow it to go outside but this time you have changed, your technique so even if the dog continues to whine a lot it is not allowed to go out anymore. Eventually the dog will learn that whining will do him no good so it stops.

So, there you have it. All you need to know about training a dog. Many dog lovers believe that positive reinforcement is the best way to train a dog but let me remind you that you should assess the behavior of your dog before training. Most of the time, a combination of principles have to to be put together in order for your dog to learn. Good luck!