Training Your Family Dog
We all love our dogs, and our dogs love to feel like they are really part of our family. To achieve this, proper training is required, which can be daunting for some which is where a qualified and dedicated dog trainer can step in to help. But we’ve also included four top expert tips for training a great family dog to help you on your journey.
Get Everyone Involved
Training a family dog is about inclusion. You want to make your dog part of the family, so ensure that he or she knows it. This can easily be achieved by getting everyone involved with the training process, particularly your children. Approaching training in this way ensures that bonds of love and trust are forged early, laying the groundwork for a happy, healthy and well-behaved dog.
Be Positive
Training a dog to be obedient while retaining the natural sparkle of its personality requires positivity and lots of it. This makes the training process enjoyable for the whole family, and is the most effective way to create lifelong habits in your dog. Rewarding good behaviour with treats, adopting a warm and open posture, are two ways to introduce and maintain this positivity.
Your Dog is Not Human
Dogs are intelligent and communicative creatures, but they do not have the language comprehension skills that humans do. Instead, it is up to you as an owner to create a communication system for you and your dog. When asked to contribute advice recently in an article by Bupa Pet Insurance, ‘Dog Training Tips for a Great Family Dog‘, our number one tip was to not anthropomorphise your dog.
‘The dog trainers at Command Dog Training School like to remind clients that their dog is not a person, so they shouldn’t be treated like one nor expected to respond like one. Instead, they encourage you to try to communicate with your dog in a way they can understand, using hand signals and short, simple cues.’
Show as Well as Tell
Sometimes words just won’t cut it, and in these cases you will have to show as well as tell. Use your dog’s favourite toy or treat to guide the animal to where you want it to be, or use firm but gentle pressure on your pet’s behind to push it down or raise it up, repeating the command as you do so and building the associations. Firm but gentle are the operative words here; training should never be a painful experience for your dog, and being overly forceful will be counterproductive.
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