Pet Dog Training

Now that you know all the don’ts, it is time to learn how to train a dog effectively. The first thing we must do is to let our dog know who is the owner, the leader or alpha male of the pack, whatever you prefer to call him. We strongly recommend you read the article: How to Dominate my dog. Making our companion understand that you are the alpha male is fundamental both to training him and to having a correct coexistence.

How to train a dog correctly so that he learns

The training of our companion must be done in a constant way, that is to say, to carry out training work three or four times a week, in a continuous and persevering way. We must begin the sessions after having had a long walk with our dog, it is essential that he has relieved himself, and that he has run, played, and done his needs before beginning any training session, especially if he is of an active breed such as Doberman or Pitbull. A dog that has not been unloaded will never learn correctly, because he will simply not concentrate.

To carry out the training sessions we must choose a quiet place, where no other dog distracts us, where there are no intense noises or constant passing of people. We need a certain intimacy so that our pet learns as much as possible and concentrates.

We must carry prizes to reward our dog when he does well the exercises, dog cookies, pieces of sausages, or bread, can be perfect prizes. Cuddles and caresses are also good rewards to complement the food rewards.

When our dog does an exercise well, we will congratulate him enthusiastically: Good! Well done! That’s the way to do it! Very good Tobby! etc… We will give him a cookie or a piece of sausage as a reward and we will pet him. He must know that we are happy because he has done well, it is fundamental.

When our dog does the exercise wrong, we will simply go back to the initial position and start the exercise again. When he gets to the part where he makes the mistake, we will simply tell him in a firm voice “No”. It is not necessary to shout or punish him, nor give him any reward.

The training sessions should not last more than half an hour, if we exceed half an hour, we must play for no less than fifteen minutes before restarting the training session. Never exceed the daily hour of training, we do not want nor should we stress them.

In this article we are not going to teach how to use our dog for self-defense, it is an unnecessary risk that inexperienced people teach such dangerous exercises to dogs. If you want to teach your dog self-defense exercises, you must go to a professional trainer, yes or yes. There is no excuse for you not to do it, if you wrongly teach defense exercises to your dog, it will be a catastrophe.

During the training sessions we must exercise only one command until he learns it correctly, we cannot teach him a thousand things, not even two things in one session, we must go step by step, day by day.

We must always use the same command for each exercise, if one day we teach him to sit with the command “Sit”, we cannot change it the next day or the following week for “Sit”, we must always keep the same commands.

How to teach our dog to sit in a simple way

Once we have followed all the above-mentioned guidelines and we are in a quiet place to start the training session, we are going to see how to teach our dog to sit.

We will not place in front of our dog, with the left hand we will hold him gently by the collar, with the only intention that he does not leave and stay by our side. With the right hand, we will press on his back, at the height of the buttocks, so that he folds his back legs and sits down. While we apply pressure with the right hand and he sits down, we will tell him with a firm voice only once the order we want for that exercise, for example, “Sit” or “Sit”.

When he sits, we will release him and congratulate him, give him a reward (cookie or piece of sausage), and pet him a little. We must repeat this exercise constantly until our dog sits just by listening to the command, when we say “Sit” or “Sit” he should do it by himself, without the need of us pressing him on his back with our right hand.

It is not an easy job, we may need a few days to get him to do it effectively. It is important that on days when there is no training, we repeat this order at home, for example, before giving him dinner or petting him. It is a positive and indirect way to remind him of what we have done in the training session.

As the days go by, he will do the exercise on his own, it is then time to perform the next step: Let him stay seated until we give you the command to get up.

We will perform the sitting exercise with the command “Sit” and when the dog sits, we will move away from him little by little, without turning our back to him. When the dog gets up to come to us, we will chirp him with the command “No!” and we will indicate him to sit again.

We must repeat this step until he remains seated and we can move away from him a couple of meters, without him getting up. We will do it progressively, we will ask him to sit and we will move half a meter away, we will ask him to come with the command “Come” or “Here” to come closer to us and we will reward him, congratulate him and pet him. When he learns to do this well, we will repeat, moving a little further away, about one meter. When he does it well, we will move away a meter and a half and so on until he learns to stay seated even if we move away five or ten meters.