Is your dog’s bad behavior causing you stress? Don’t just put it with it. It’s time to get down to some consistent dog obedience training. This means you should be persistent and consistent with your training. However, training should always be fun for your dog or it will quickly get bored!

What Are Your Dog’s Basic Need?

With power comes great responsibility. If you don’t provide your dog’s basic needs, you shouldn’t be surprised if you have a badly behaved  or neurotic dog. What are the basic needs? Here are the main ones:

• water and food
• regular daily exercise
• social interaction with dogs and people
• an environment which stimulates him.

The main point in training your dog is to adopt positive and negative reinforcement. When your dog does a behavior that you want to encourage, you should reward him with a treat or affection. The treat or affection must come as soon after the behavior as humanly possible in order for it to be effective.

It’s best to concentrate on positive reinforcement for wanted behaviors rather than negative reinforcement for bad behaviors. This has been found to be a more efficient way of training.

Physical punishment is not an effective or compassionate way to train dogs and will only lead to a  fearful and neurotic dog. You can say a firm “No” in a growling tone of voice to stop him behaving badly. Perhaps most effective is to ignore your dog when he behaves badly. Dogs want your attention and if you ignore him - that will be negative reinforcement in itself.

You should learn to see your dog as a dog, not a human being. It will help you to do this if you study dog communication and the dynamics of a dog pack. You read about what their body language means. They have various ways of communicating: with their tail, head position, ear position, mouth and teeth and vocally with various kinds of barks, growls and whines.

Another important aspect of training is to position yourself as the pack leader. If your dog is the alpha dog, he is never going to be well-behaved for you because he thinks you are one of his pack. Some pointers to set yourself up as alpha dog:
-eat a some food in front of your dog just before you feed him. The alpha dog always eats first.
-don’t let him to get on the sofa or bed. The pack leader sleeps on higher ground.
-make sure you go through doors before your dog.

This is an introduction to some important points in dog training. I recommend you look into the most systematic of training methods: clicker training for dogs.