How To Obedience Train Your Dog

How To Obedience Train Your Dog.. When you watch obedience classes with dogs prancing perfectly at the handlers side, you are witnessing the end product of hours of practice. Hours of ring practice, not house dog practice. Dogs cannot keep that type of constant attention long term. Even agility dogs are trained to offer short spurts of intense cues and then they are left to unwind.

At our house, obedience means stick around when we go outside. It means NO when I say NO. It means hang out in the room we are in, and don't wander around the rest of the house. It means load into the car or kennel when we ask (and not run around the yard or living room playing keep away).

Obedience at our house also means sleep on your own beds, not ours. No jumping on counters or begging for food (they may politely wait for food...from a distance). Obedience at our house means No barking, unless we say you can. At our house SIT is rarely in our obedience vocabulary. STAY is something that we say to our dog Larry when he looks like he is going to panic.

You see, training a dog is just another way to build structure.

And structure builds a bond with your dog.

There are two ways to obedience train your dog.

1. Yell or jerk on them when they do something you dislike.

or

2. Say good dog when they do something you like.

Think about a time when you were learning how to do something... like how to use your email. If you asked someone for help and they just said NO everytime you did it wrong, would you be more frustrated or less frustrated with email?

Now, say your dog jumps on your couch and you hate that...

What if you said the word up every time your dog jumped onto the couch (rewarding him of course), and then said the word off and showed him what off the couch meant (rewarding that behavior too). If you can learn how to obedience train your dog by using the two words, off and up you have given your dog the big picture.

Dogs need guidance, but they need to know what they can do, and not just get yelled at when they have done something wrong.

How To Obedience Train Your Dog (definitions for the pet dog owner)

STAY Don't move (I see you eyeing up that bunny)

HEEL You can do several things, except pull on my arm.

COME I promise it will be worth your while.

SIT I need you to wait right there for me.

NO Don't do that again, but you can do this...

DOWN I know it's stupid, but you'll get bacon out of the deal.

When you sign up for the How To Obedience Train Your Dog class, make yourself a list of things you really need your dog to learn. And then make a list of things that you already dislike.

Why?

Because if you train the behavior you dislike, you just never give the command.

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