Friday, July 6, 2012

Are you training your dog unacceptable habits?

By Arthur Smith


It is easy to teach your dog the habits that drive you loony. This is performed by something by the name of reinforcement. Good dog trainers have learned to channel this strengthening in a good fashion to prompt repeat behaviour. By brooding about how you react when your dog is doing something unhelpful you may be surprised to learn you are actually keeping up the habit that you want to see stop.

To gain a understanding of beefing up you must first realize that your dog translates reward differently to the way us human beings do. Attention is one of the main rewarding factors to your dog. This attention can be, in your eyes, negative or positive, it still provides a reward.

An example of this is the uncontrollable family dog. All dogs need attention from their owners. They like us and wish to know that we feel exactly the same way. Wretchedly a dog that is ignored much of the time and only spoken to when he's being a nuisance is, in his eyes rewarded for doing something unhelpful. So he will repeat the behaviour in order to repeat the reward. It is not important if he's roared at or punished, because in his eyes, negative attention is much better than none whatsoever.

A common difficulty with pet dogs is jumping up at folk. This behavior almost guarantees the reward of attention. Folk automatically touch a dog that jumps up, and frequently speak to him. Immediately the attention has been reinforced. Jumping up works, next time he wants attention the dog will jump up again.

To shape a nicely behaved dog you need to reward good behavior, show your dog that it is worth repeating. Give him the attention that he would like by carrying out some relaxed and fun training sessions. You can learn to brace behaviour by teaching your dog to do tricks. Research how to teach a dog to play dead. It'll be a great learning experience for both of you. You will learn timing and positive reinforcement from teaching this trick.




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