The biggest secret to training your dog is understanding the method of positive conditioning. All that’s really required after that is a lot of patience and being very consistent. Most dog behavior problems stem from not understanding reinforcement or from not applying it consistently.
To utilize it consistently, you will need an abundance of patience. You need to understand the levels of time required to train a dog. You also need to appreciate that being consistent doesn’t just mean during a short training session but whenever you and anyone else are interacting with your dog. This means that you also need everyone in your household to be consistent also.
Positive conditioning means that a positive reinforcement i.e. pleasant stimulus when your dog performs an action will encourage him to perform that particular action again. It’s unfortunate that a lot of owners positively reinforce unwanted behaviors in their dogs. For example, they enter the house, the dog is jumping up on them and they give affection to the dog. Affection is a positive reinforcement and so the dog is being encouraged to jump up on people.
I enjoy watching the Dog Whisperer on TV. One thing I notice is that owners are invariably reinforcing negative behaviors in their dogs without being aware of it. And this is in spite of the fact that they are fully aware of the process from watching Cesar on the program. The Dog Whisperer is very different which is why the dogs behave differently with him. He behaves consistently and ignores the dog if it’s doing unwanted behaviors. In nearly every case that he helps, the problems are with the owner and his inconsistency.
Lots of awareness and self-discipline are needed to stop yourself giving affection to a misbehaving dog. Any attention is better than no attention to a dog. This means that, unfortunately, shouting at your dog may positively reinforce the behavior even though your intention is the opposite of that. So, it may be best to respond to unwanted behaviors by ignoring them and turning away from your dog.
Focusing on reinforcing positive behavior is more effective than trying to negatively reinforce unwanted behavior. The more you reinforce positive behaviors, the less the unwanted behaviors will occur.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t stop your dog doing unwanted behaviors. It just means that it’s not part of your training process – it’s just damage control. For example, if he jumps on the food counter, you can just pull him off.
How do you positively reinforce actions you want to encourage? You reward the behavior by giving a tasty treat or by giving affection. Using small tasty treats is probably the easiest method. The treat needs to be given as close in time to the behavior as possible. Because of the importance of timing, the use of a clicker makes the reward process clearer to your dog. The clicker sound is used to mark the behavior precisely as it happens and the treat comes immediately afterwards. However, clicker training is a whole subject in itself but well worth looking into since it will supercharge your training.
Tags: Abundance, Affection, clicker training, Dog Behavior Problems, dog problems, Dog Training, Dogs, Household, Inconsistency, Intention, Negative Behaviors, Patience, positive reinforcement, secrets to dog training, Self Discipline, Spite, Stimulus, train a dog, Train Dog, Training Dog, Training Session, training your dog, Unwanted Behaviors
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