Saturday, July 30, 2011

Dog Training Can Be Pleasant For Pet And Owner With Positive Reinforcement Methods

By Adrianna Noton


Dog training is imperative for maintaining a healthy interaction between dog and owner. You cannot expect dogs to behave in a perfect manner and they keep doing wrong things. This is true of all living beings. A dog is to be trained in order to achieve the behavior expected of it by the owner.

The training of dogs proved to be beneficial during war time. Techniques were introduced and developed during the First World War. After World War II civilians adopted these ideas to keep their own dogs under control. These methods were quite harsh and the pets were often punished to get them to comply. This approach is what we call negative reinforcement.

Positive reinforcement later became the popular method. This method use reward rather than punishment. When the dog does well, it gets rewarded. The dog is for instance given a food treat when it lays down on command. It will then tend to lie down more often in an effort to get the snack.

It is the opinion of some people that positive trainers do not insist on teaching them what is acceptable and what is unacceptable behavior. This is not a correct assumption. It can be said that the positive dog trainers teach the dogs these aspects but they do not impose punitive measures for teaching them.

The main advantage of teaching dogs with positive reinforcement is that the lessons are always fun and enjoyable for both the owners and their pets. Understanding is easy and the atmosphere is always friendly. The lessons include obedience techniques as well as methods which help to solve antisocial problems like excessive barking and jumping on visitors.

Harsh aids including choke chains and shock devices are generally avoided in this kind of training. It is fine to use a clicker. A clicker is a tiny instrument that emits a click sound when squeezed. This comes handy to indicate the exact time when the animal was able to do a particular behavior correctly.

There has been developments that focus on natural situations and instincts. Each species has behaviors that occur naturally . Training process relies on those behaviors and what the animal would normally do. The instructor will work with the dog on what comes naturally predicting how they will react in a particular situation.

This teaching technique is used when the trainers believes there are hierarchies in a group of animals. The owner will be the more dominant force in this. Usually the trainers using this method do not think of themselves as trainers. They strive to communicates with the animals. They feel that they understand the dogs and they act according to how they read the body language of the animals. Some of these trainers call themselves dog whisperers.

Some people do not believe in this at all and say it is just a theory. There have been a few biologists who say that the alpha dog concept is not true and that there is no such thing. There are many trainers though that truly believe in this concept and some of them have had spectacular results with their dog training Calgary.




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