Training your dog is an essential aspect of taking care of him.
It is not only to help you manage his behavior but also to ensure your doggie grows up happy and healthy.
Of course, training can sometimes be overwhelming. While pet owners have the best intentions, there are times that mistakes are made during training. The sad thing is that a lot of pet lovers don’t even know that they are committing mistakes.
Thankfully, we are here to help you recognize the most common errors in training a dog. Recognizing these mistakes early on would help you improve the result of your training and would even make you more efficient in handling your pet.
1. Prolonged Training Time
Do you remember those college days that you need to attend a boring seminar for a couple of hours and end up learning almost nothing because it took so long to finish? As you can imagine, people have a certain attention span. This is also true in dogs.
Dogs may get bored and tired during training. Some pet owners feel that the longer they train their dogs, the better. In reality, that’s not the case.
Following the same command over and over again could be too tedious for dogs. Your pooch is not a robot who can easily record and learn commands flawlessly. Making the training session shorter or giving breaks during training would lead to better results.
2. Training the Same Place
Training your pooch in just one place can lead to potential problems in the future. You see, dogs can adapt to their surroundings and with the help of training, they can become obedient.
The problem happens when you bring your dog to another place. You will soon see that your dog isn’t obeying you anymore.
For example, if you are used to training him inside your home, you might get a different response when you bring him to the park.
To successfully train your dog, you would need to expose him to various settings. This allows your dog to be obedient no matter where you bring him.
3. Impatience
Each dog learns at a different pace. Training takes a lot of time too. The things that seem easy for you may not be easy for your dog.
When you are impatient, you tend to easily get mad and raise a tone to your dog. Dogs are like children. They like to respond to a calm and neutral tone of command. Sometimes, they even respond better when your voice sounds sweet and nice.
If you are angry during training, this could lead to a lot of problems. One, your dog may not respond to you very well. He could ignore you because he knows you’re mad at him.
Worst of all, you might become aggressive and violent when you’re impatience. When you’re angry during your training session, you might shout and even hit your dog – things that don’t really lead to good results in training.
It’s important to set a realistic goal. Your dog doesn’t turn into a super obedient pooch overnight. The training process takes time. Having a great amount of patience helps tremendously in training.
4. Too Many Treats
Treats are a great way to reward your pet when he has done something nice. During training, treats are awesome tools to help your dog associate good behavior with positive experiences.
However, giving too many treats could lead to negative results. For one, you might run out of treats. Two, your dog might expect more treats before he will obey you. Three, too many treats could be bad for his health.
Treats should be a means to make your dog want to obey you. Thus, giving one or two treats should be enough under normal circumstances. If your dog made great progress, you can reward extra treats. Just don’t overdo it.
Aside from treats, you can reward your pooch with play, toys, and praises. These allow your dog to enjoy a wider range of rewards rather than just giving treats.
5. Inconsistency
Old men say, “When you use to do a certain thing over and over, it will be in your system automatically.” This means that with great consistency, you’ll learn to do something perfectly.
If there’s one thing that you need to remember when training your dog, it would be consistency. The more consistent you are in training, the faster your dog learns.
The problem is when you become inconsistent. It can dramatically confuse your dog, thereby delaying the learning process.
Telling your dog not to pee or poo inside the house is a good thing. However, when you ignore your dog even just once when he does this bad behavior, it could tell your dog that it is okay to pee or poo wherever he wants.
That’s one good example of inconsistency.
We know that sometimes, it gets tiring and you let some bad behaviors slide. However, if you tolerate bad behaviors today and correct them tomorrow, it will not help your dog.
Be consistent and when you do, you will get better results.
We All Make Mistakes
These are some of the most common mistakes when training your dog.
It is important to realize that all of us commit mistakes every once in a while. What’s important is that we learn from our mistakes and try our best to avoid them.
Training your dog can be challenging at times, but if you are patient and consistent, you get your sweet reward. So, whenever you feel like giving up, just think about how awesome it would be to have a skilled, obedient, and well-behaved dog.
