Training a Puppy Takes Time
Anyone that brings a new puppy home has to learn the techniques for training a puppy. While there will be times of frustration when the puppy will certainly test your limits of patience, the training is necessary for both you and your puppy to learn to get along well together. The puppy is a baby and is totally dependent on your for meeting all of its needs. You will be the one responsible for shaping its character and temperament and its behavior.
The most important thing to keep in mind when training a puppy is that you should always train with positive reinforcement rather than with punishment. This means you should use rewards, praise and encouragement so that when the puppy does something right, it knows that it did do something to please you and will associate the event with the feeling of pleasure. Training sessions should be kept short so that the puppy doesn’t get bored or tired. You should concentrate on teaching it one thing at a time and when it learns this behavior, you can then move on to something else.
The first type of training you have to provide for the puppy is potty training. It is not a race to see how quickly you can train the puppy to go outdoors or in a certain area of the house. Rather the main thing is to take your time to teach the puppy good habits that will prevent mistakes from happening. Even when you think you do have the potty training complete, accidents will happen occasionally. A dog’s natural instinct is to keep the area where it sleeps clean, so it will not go potty in this area. Crate training is one method puppy owners use. They keep the puppy in the crate and take it out to go on a newspaper or outdoors on a regular basis and play with it for a while.
Potty training is not the same as house training. In house training, you have to train the puppy not to get up on the furniture, where its food and water bowls are located and not to chew on shoes or furniture. It also needs to have people around so it becomes accustomed to the family and learns how to socialize. The first four months of the puppy’s life are crucial in shaping its future behavior patterns and temperament. When you take the puppy to obedience classes, you can teach it the correct behavior. It is much harder to try to correct undesirable behavior at a later date.
Some dogs bark excessively and this behavior needs to be corrected through training. The goal of this training is not to stop the dog from barking altogether because there are times when dogs do need to bark to warn you of danger. First you have to determine if there are specific times of the day or night when the dog barks the most. Then you can start observing the surroundings to find out if there is a cause for the barking. Sometimes, you don’t have to resort to using bark collars if you find that the dog is lonely and is barking to get your attention.
This is often the case when you are at work leaving the dog home alone all day and then getting complaints from the neighbors. Some ways of eliminating this problem include buying the dog toys to play with, placing a ticking clock near the sleeping area so that it thinks someone else is there or training it not to bark every time it hears the slightest sound.
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