Things to Avoid When Training Your Dog

It is the ambition of every dog owner to have a well-trained dog. However, many dog owners do not take into account the amount of effort and time which is needed to train a dog properly. That is the reason why a number of mistakes are made which could be easily avoided with a little bit of common sense and effort.

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.

That is the reason why people get frustrated when they repeat the same command a number of times and the dog does not seem to comprehend it. In 98% of the cases the dog does not understand it, and that is why it is not necessarily ignoring that particular command. One should understand that, because it is possible that they responded to that command before but not on this particular occasion.

Some dogs probably would be called headstrong if they were human. However, they can be thrown off easily or not be able to put together the command of “come” 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.

Keep in mind that patience means that you restrain your temper when what you actually want is to lash out physically. It’s natural to think about taking the easy route of physical punishment as the first option for correcting the dog’s behavior. However, this should be reserved for only the most serious situations. The dog doesn’t really comprehend why they’re being smacked. This will not develop into trust and confidence, but to the contrary fear.

In addition, dogs are like humans because they too will more readily follow those that are trusted than those that are feared. They only follow those that they fear when they have no other alternative. But dogs make choices very differently than people do. They usually withstand any punishment they bear without actually learning from it. Physical punishment is not an effective 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.

Follow these altogether useless methods and you’ll end up with a disturbed dog and you will be an unhappy owner. But if this isn’t the outcome you are looking for, be prepared to adjust YOUR behavior, before you try to change the behavior of the dog.