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

Understand Your Dog Basic Needs

Your dog has to rely on you to provide for him. If you don’t satisfy your dog’s basic needs, it shouldn’t be a surprise if your dog behaves badly. What are the basic needs? Here are the main ones:

• food and water
• regular daily exercise
• company and social interaction
• a stimulating environment.

The main principle in dog training is to adopt positive and negative reinforcement. When your dog engages in a behavior that is wanted, you should reward him with a treat or affection. It’s vital that the reward comes immediately after the desired behavior or the dog will not connect the two thing.

It’s best to focus on positive reinforcement for behavior you want to encourage rather than negative reinforcement for undesired behaviors. This has been found to be a more productive way of training.

Physical punishment is not an effective or humane way to train dogs and will only lead to your dog being neurotic and fearful. That’s not going to be a good relationship between man and dog. You can say a firm “No” in a growling tone of voice to stop him behaving badly. Ignoring your dog and turning away from him is the most productive thing for you to do when he behaves badly. Dogs crave attention and being ignored is negative reinforcement enough.

At all costs you should avoid humanizing your dog. Dogs have their own way of communicating which you will not understand unless you study it. 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.

Being pack leader or alpha dog is vital if you want your dog to behave well. If your dog is the alpha dog, you will be fighting a losing battle to get him to behave as you want. Why would he take notice of one of his pack member? Some advice on positioning yourself up as alpha dog:
-eat a a little snack in front of your dog just before you feed him. The alpha dog always eats before the pack members.
-don’t let him to onto the bed or sofa. The pack leader sleeps on higher ground.
-don’t allow him to go through the door before you.

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