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Dog training: discipline and communication
Well-trained dogs can do wonderful things. Dog training seeks to ensure that dogs are capable of carrying out specific activities, whether they are basic notions of coexistence, tricks, sports, therapy, or tasks to help people with special needs, such as the blind or disabled in a wheelchair, for example. Training your dog can go through several pieces of training, including training collars, training shock collars, training bark collars, etc.
The basic dog training is based on the puppy-human connection that is established through trust and respect. When educating a dog, we must attend to its body language and its particular needs to achieve the right bond. This way, you will pay attention to us and understand what we need you to do.
So what’s the best way to train a dog?
In dog training a lot of discipline is necessary, but we should never use punishment or negative reinforcement as a training technique. These measures, in addition to being unpleasant, are not effective. Also, they can affect the health of the animal by stressing it or even causing depression.
You will now learn the best training techniques and the most frequent commands in dog training, and how to train your dog properly.
Dog Training Commands: What You Should Know Before
There are all kinds of commands for dogs in canine training. Training a police dog to rescue people is not the same as training a dog for agility competition, for example. Some disciplines have their specific dog training commands So here comes the question of how to teach your dog commands? In general, there are no firm rules on how the commands should be given to dogs in training.
However, there are several tasks that we can teach our dogs at home by following certain guidelines. These tasks are usually essential basic orders for the animal to learn to live with other people and with other animals.
Before starting to train our dog we will have to take into account the following training tips for dogs:
- It is essential to arm yourself with patience and be understanding with the dog.
- You have to respect your dog’s/puppy’s natural needs and not push him too hard to do something he doesn’t want to do.
- Never use physical punishment, yelling, or negative reinforcement in general.
- Find a quiet and spacious place.
- Don’t make your training sessions too long, fifty minutes at a time will be enough.
- Always reward the animal’s behaviour.
- Make sure the training is entertaining for both of you.
- Commit to your dog’s/puppy’s education and be consistent.
- Don’t use different words for the same command.
- Make sure all family members know the commands and the words the dog or puppy has learned.
So these learning commands are also useful for basic puppy training, and there are not so different from basic dog commands to puppy commands.
What are the main orders for dogs?
Dogs have a highly developed sense of hearing. Therefore, it is a very important voice in training canine. When training a dog, we have to know how to use this tool correctly: using a firm tone, with a volume that is neither too high nor too low, and pronouncing it in a very marked way.
For this reason, the dog commands normally given to dogs in training are short, unique, forceful words with strong pronunciations.
Many trainers choose English or German words to be short and precise. However, we can also educate our dogs with words in Spanish or in the language we prefer. But we’ll stick with English ones so learning dog commands, and learning puppy commands usually starts with the basic training words like:
sit (sit), stay (still), down (lie down)
Frequent canine commands
The most frequent dog commands that we can teach our dogs are the following:
- Sit: our dog must learn to sit when we ask him to. Thus, you will be calm when we are in the vet’s office or when you have to wait for us somewhere.
- Quiet: this command is very important so that you do not get upset when a visitor comes home or when we walk down the street and we have to wait at the traffic light, for example.
- Come: by teaching this order to our animal we prevent it from escaping when it runs loose on the street.
- Lie down: when we teach the dog to sit and stay still, we can add this command to make it lie down. This order is simple and allows the animal to rest if we are going to stay in a place for a long time and we need it to be calm.
- Together: this command is essential for the dog to learn to walk correctly on the street with or without the leash.
- Bring this command they learn very easily! We tell them when we throw the ball or a stick in the park to play. They love it!
- Search: this command complements the previous one in-game time. With this command, they practice their natural tracking instinct and have a great time.
- Release: this command is designed so that the dog returns something that it has between its legs or in its mouth and that it does not want to give us.