Having Dog Training Problems? Try A Different Dog Obedience Training Method

by Carrie

Dog Behavior Issues, Dog Breeds

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dog-obedience-training-by-Quinn-Dombrowski.jpg There are many different dog training techniques out there.

If you’re like me, you’ve probably read books on how to train your dog, and maybe you’ve even taken your dog to obedience classes.

With the many different methods, types, and styles of dog training, dog training problems can inevitably result — depending on which one you choose and the breed and personality of your dog.

Here’s how to find the right dog obedience training method for you and your dog…

 

Dog Training Requires Time

Most people find that they don’t have as much time to to train their dog as they initially thought they would.  As a result, dog training is often rushed and the results may not be the most desirable.

Unfortunately, inconsistent dog training leads to inconsistent dog behavior.  So your best option is to give it 110% whenever you make an effort to train your dog.

The underlying premise of most obedience classes is that a dog can be trained and socialized in just a few hours. This is almost never true, and it’s the kind of expectation that leads people to feel like they’ve failed when it’s more likely they’ve been misled. It requires an estimated 2,000 repetitions, behaviorists say, before most dogs can fully learn a behavior. If you’ve told Ellie to “sit” 1,000 times, and she complies half the time, you haven’t failed, and neither has she. You’re both halfway there. Source

 

Experiment To Find The Best Dog Training Method For You

Typically, it’s not until you realize that you have a particular problem with your dog that you will decide to look for advice on how to train your dog in an effort to change that behavior.

The advice can come from many different sources. For example, you may:

  • Read books on how to train your dog.
  • Take your dog to obedience classes.
  • Get advice from friends and family.

The truth is, one person (or book) may tell you to clicker train your dog, while another may tell you to use a shock collar, and another might encourage you to use food as a reward.  With all of these different traning methods, it’s no wonder that dog training problems arise sometimes.

In my opinion, the best way to train your dog is by your own experience. You still want to get advice and read books about specific dog behavior issues, but you have to realize that what works for someone else may not work for you.

That’s why it’s important to be open-minded and experiment with a couple different dog training methods in order to find what works best for you and your dog.

 

Tweaking Dog Obedience Training Tips

When we were training Nakita (our Min Pin), we read a lot of books, got a lot of advice from other dog owners, and we also took her to obedience classes.

For the most part, the training we did with her in dog obedience class worked the best for us.

There were a couple of things that we had to tweak a little bit.  For example when we trained her to heel, the dog trainer wanted us to have our dog halt and sit when we approached a crossroad or alley way.  We couldn’t get Nakita to sit over half the time, so what we did was we just had her halt (and not sit).  She would stay next to us and not try to cross the road until we told her to heel again.  So in the end, we tweaked the dog training advice we received just a little in order to suit our dog.

One reason that dog training problems may arise is because a particular dog training method works well for, say, a working dog breed but maybe not for a herding dog.  You see, not all dog breeds will train the same ways.

 

Why Dog Training Fails

Here are 5 reasons dog training problems occur:

  1. Inaccurate mental model – Most dog owner have the mindset, “How hard can training a dog be?”  Many also don’t think it will take that long to train their dogs.
  2. Lack of a trustworthy source – As a dog owner, if you don’t have a reliable person that you can turn to for training your dog, you will turn to books and total strangers to help you instead.
  3. Lack of confidence in a particular training method – Most dog owners don’t have much faith that what they are trying to teach their dog will work and, therefore, it doesn’t work.
  4. Lack of knowledge about dog behavior & training – We tend to trust people who claim they know how to train dogs, because they (usually) know more than we do.  But do they really know how to train a dog properly?
  5. Difficulty in implementing dog training methods – Most dog training methods are designed to teach the average dog owner (who doesn’t fully understand dog behavior and training methods) how to teach their dog to do something (or not do something). However, this training can be very confusing and it often results in some steps being accidentally omitted or misinterpreted.

 

Tips To Avoid Dog Training Problems

 

Once you have found the method of dog training that you feel comfortable with, you may want to try adding some harder dog tricks into your dog’s routine. Here are 101 dog tricks that might be fun to teach your dog.  The dog tricks range from easy ones like sit and stay to harder ones like wiggle your ears and pull a cart.