What to Avoid When Training Your Dog

One of the most important aspects of having a dog is to dedicate the time to train it properly. A dog that doesn't receive training is likely to develop bad behaviors that will eventually lead to its dismissal from the family. It is your responsibility to teach your dog how to behave in order to welcome it as a new member of the family.

Training your dog can be done the right way or the wrong way, and unfortunately, many owners choose the latter. They follow ineffective systems or try to train their dogs "their way" without even having an understanding of the animal's natural behavior or needs. This leads to frustration and anger in both the owner and the dog so it is important to recognize some of the most common mistakes you can do in training your dog so you can avoid them.

One of the most common mistakes people make when training their dogs is to lose their patience. Many owners believe that dogs are able to learn commands and relate them to actions very fast, but this is not the case, even in humans. Dogs need a lot of time, persistence and repetition of the command-action-reward mechanism to reinforce the habit as a conduct. You will need to repeat several times the command before the dog realizes what you want, and then you need to reward the conduct and repeat until it understands.

One of the tools people wrongly use to train their dogs is punishment. Dogs react according to past experiences, so if you punish your dog often, every time it sees you will think you are going to treat it bad. This is sad because it hurts your relationship with your dog, and makes the training process even harder. Dogs learn much faster by the reward system. When your dog exhibits the desired conduct give it a treat or a palm in the head. It will repeat the conduct to receive more of it and your bond with your dog will be stronger.

Another common mistake is the lack of consistency. Dogs like things that are predictable, so giving consistency to your dog will accelerate the learning process. When you give your dog a command, it obeys and you reward him, then he will expect the same reaction from you every time the dog makes something that pleases his master. Rewarding consistently will make your dog's brain conditioned to the behavior and the result is that your dog will be trained in no time.