“A Mans Best Friend”
Jun 24 2009
Most dog owners sincerely want to train their dog well. But an almost equal number will underestimate the time and effort it takes to do so. The result is frequently a common set of mistakes that can be, with more or less effort, avoided.
Dogs are not furry children. Though the average mature dog has a mental development somewhere around the level of a two year old human, there are more differences than similarities. Dogs can be amazing at processing language. But they don’t reason the way humans do. They don’t connect cause and effect in the same way we do.
As a result, it can be frustrating to repeat the same command over and over, only to have the dog apparently ignore you. Most times, they are not ignoring the command as much as failing to understand it. It seems obvious - they’ve done the behavior successfully many times before - today they are just ‘being stubborn’.
The fact of the matter is that most dogs are not stubborn, but just easily distracted. Or they just don’t today’s order of ‘come’ with yesterdays correct behaviour. You should bare in mind that ther are many other explanations for this change in behaviour.
So please have patience. Most dogs need a lot of repetition before they truly dominate a command. You have to train them in different settings. For some dogs you might need many, many months of training before they finally come every time you call him.
Part of that patience means keeping your temper when you feel angry. It’s easy to spank your dog as a way to correct your dog’s behavior. But that’s only for very rare occasions and really should be avoided at all times. A dog normally doesn’t understand why you’re hitting them. It instills fear, not trust.
Just like people, dogs are more likely to follow the one they like and trust. When a dog fears you he will only show the desired behaviour when you are in reach. Dogs don’t reason like humans. They endure punishment without really learning anything. Punishing your dog just isn’t very effective as a training excercise.
These are the 3 most frequente dog training mistakes:
- Believe that your dog is just like you and talk to him as if he were a person.
- Think that dogs are capable of relating and understanding cause and result over time.
- Get angry with your dog when he doesn’t obey you and spank him for not listening to you.
When you commit these dog training mistakes in the end you’ll have a disobedient dog. However if you wish for your dog to behave well you might want to start with yourself first and then dedicate time to training your dog.
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