Your Complete Guide To Safe Outings And Amazingly Enjoyable Strolls
Dog obedience training done like an expert ensures you keep your dog alive. A disobedient dog may provoke a bigger one, may run into traffic, may attack a child. And you will be held responsible for not having taught it how to heel.
If ever you walk a friend or neighbor’s dog, realize the responsibility you’re undertaking. Professional dog walkers know that there is no way safely to walk with a stranger’s dog without first teaching it to heel. And you cannot teach a dog to heel without understanding the fundamentals of dog obedience training.
If you wish not to take risks in public and display the confidence of an expert, you must learn to master this skill for your neighbor, your dog and your own sake. The purpose of this free online guide is to show you how to train a dog to obey you so you may safely and comfortably walk it on a leash, whether for work or fun, but especially if your desire is to start a dog walking business.
The Role of Dog Obedience Training Classes
Although there is value in either joining dog obedience classes or a dog training group near you, private dog training is just as effective as are most dog training techniques taught in dog behavior classes. In fact, private rather than group dog obedience training is a much better option for you when dealing with a very high-energy and inattentive dog.
Distractions in an unfamiliar environment will hinder a dog’s ability to concentrate on a new obedience training lesson. Group obedience training classes are effective in developing dog socialization skills. But to train a dog to heel and obey, it is often best to do it privately to secure the animal’s complete focus on you.
Read through our guide, view the dog training videos, grab a dog and put your new knowledge immediately into practice. Watch yourself successfully conduct your own dog training at home. It’s all here available within your reach. Read on. Follow the steps. And you will receive positive and negative reinforcement dog training tips, including how to use dog obedience training equipment even to step out with more than one dog on a leash.
Learn this and you will live out what so very few people achieve yet want to do – safely walk their dogs with sufficient confidence to offer profitable dog walking services to their grateful and even paying dog loving neighbors.
Dog Training Near Me. Is It A Must?
You keep hearing, “I can’t keep my dog indoors all day. But whenever we step out, it’s a nightmare. I need some dog training near me. But I got no time to go there.” This opens great opportunities to help your neighbor not only keep a favorite pet healthy but also find a new satisfaction in owning a disciplined dog.
When a neighbor searches for dog training near me online, this means you have a chance to be that solution, by offering this training yourself. The key to canine training, however, is not location. In other words, you do not need a special location where to conduct dog obedience training.
You can conduct dog obedience training at home by the consistent application of dog training methods to specific dog behavior problems. Some of these problems involve how to stop dog from biting, how to deal with dog running away, how to eliminate aggressive dog behavior when on a leash with other dogs, how to have dog walk behind you, that is, heel, or how to train a dog to stop barking, plus how to control dog impulses by way of commands and dog obedience hand signals.
Because a dog learns to obey what it considers to be a superior, plus it is easier for the lessons to take root when the dog experiences reinforced benefits for this obedience, you need to learn a bit about dog psychology and the positive dog training techniques along with negative sanctions that even make training an older dog possible.
So, let’s hear you now say, “Bring dog training near me!” to explain some of these details to you. Read and watch what the following experts have to say about the most effective way to start your dog training approach.
Still, before that, let’s get grounded with some rules of the trade.
Professional Dog Trainers Disagree A Lot…But Not About This
Professional opinions vary on how to interpret animal behavior and the flame that kindles it. As human perspectives change about the environment and our role in it, so do theories about dogs and how to deal with them. This has had a direct impact on dog obedience training methodology.
Every generation has had successes and failures in dealing with dogs. But the ability of humans to govern their canines, for better or for worse, has been a common thread across the ages. Long before the formalization of behaviorism as an academic discipline early in the 20th-Century, there were countless dog observers and practitioners of ageless principles of dog obedience training who, through trial and error for millennia, had learned how to use a dog’s instinctive behavior to preside over the animal.
This is what they learned: the animal must not rule itself when living among humans, lest it be man and not beast that ends up living in the wild. This is because, in the absence of humans exercising authority, it is the dog that fills the void and governs itself within the space where the human refused to rule.
But exercised correctly, human authority will constructively dominate the dog. The question becomes then, what form of domination should there be? There are two kinds: complete and incomplete.
Why In The Wild A Dog Is Not Better Without Dog Obedience Training
Through centuries of observation, early professional dog trainers learned how to channel a dog’s natural drives to pursue after a prey and eat it. It is the channeling of this natural drive that makes the dog a useful companion to people. Why is this a significant starting point in this discussion about dog obedience training?
Though rare in the extreme as an occurrence, there is a doubtless gruesome incident that illustrates the reality of what all domesticated dogs are capable of doing by instinct if driven to extremes, as was the case in 2018 with 62 year-old, Canadian Glenn Pattinson, who suddenly died alone in his rented apartment in Thailand and whose starved dog, after 10 days of confinement with his diseased master, partially ate him to remain alive.
This is brutal observed reality and earlier generations were not so squeamish at recognizing it as such and using compulsion as an inducement to achieve a desired behavior out of their dogs to ensure domestication.
Using the discipline of repetitive reinforcement, they shaped sought-after dog behaviors into results beneficial to humans, training dogs for the guiding of the blind, to protect the weak, guard property, accompany the lonely, amuse the cheerless, etc. Our ancestors used authority to domesticate the dog through well-timed rewards and punishments.
So, authority has two aspects. One is rewarding, the other one is punitive. Without either, dominion is deficient; and, a deficient dominion is destructive.
Why No Better Option for Dog Obedience Training Exists
Failing to achieve sound balance in controlling a dog will either severely harm you, the dog or others. There is no in-between. The principle of complete domination, therefore, remains fundamentally unchanging as a basis for training dogs to this day.
It is the basis of behaviorist science too. Despite often great disagreement among professional dog trainers regarding how much is too much reward or punishment, no one argues that there should be an absence of either. For either you have dominion over the dog, or the dog has dominion in the absence of your control.
In other words, the dispute today is chiefly over ethics and the responsibility of the one who governs not to abuse the authority over the one being governed, whether the abuse comes by exercising extremes of authority in either rewarding or punishing.
But that you must reward and that you must punish is unquestionable. Otherwise, you’re not the one in authority. It is instead the dog that dominates. And that is no safe or enjoyable way to go out for a walk among other humans and animals. Dog obedience training, therefore, is a must.
There is no question and you must grow comfortable with this fact, that to carry out any dog obedience training effectively, there must be an authoritative trainer who governs and an obedient trainee that must yield to authority in order to be governed. Else, you have man and dog living in a state of wilderness even in the midst of the city and, consequently, both often end up existing in bewilderment of each other there.
As a sporty dog walker, you want to be known as the peacemaker who brings harmony between animal and human. That’s your stewardship role and responsibility in taking dominion over any unruly dog needing civilizing. You’re making the streets safe and enjoyable for both animal and man. This ought to be your first concern and objective before going dog walking anywhere. It’s your meaningful contribution to the community where you live.
The Dog Whisperer Training Style And His Violent Opposition
Because most courts of law exist to enforce rights, redress wrongs and not encourage litigation, they tend to follow an old principle that goes like this: “The law does not concern itself with trifles.” What happens to dogs sometimes falls under the category of trifles. This is why they can be “put to sleep” with impunity at shelters, where they’re killed out of convenience once the animal is considered unwanted, and courts won’t do anything about it.
But another trifle has been the use of force in dog obedience training. This one has gotten more attention of late by those who consider it equivalent to animal cruelty and do not wish it to remain a triviality. It is one reason why the enormously popular Cesar Millan, “The Dog Whisperer”, took a tumble. And yet his methods work. The issue has become is not effectiveness, therefore, but manner.
Millan comes from the perspective that dominance is the result of a rush of force that equals fierceness, an attack that deactivates dog resistance and causes submission through defeat. This is something dogs understand as pack animals.
With the use of carefully calibrated force, the goal is to exhaust the dog’s ability to contest your authority. Among humans we would call this a breaking of the will. It’s what the military does to new recruits during boot camp. This treatment must assume something about the dog. It must assume some form of stubbornness or defiance that would make necessary the use of what our culture typically associates to the word violence.
The Proper Use of Violence in Dog Obedience Training
But violence can also mean to pursue something with vigor, energy, desire. It does not always necessarily imply injury, irreverence or profanation. In other words, violence is not always a morally-laden word. Much depends on the use and the context of the word.
It is possible violently to pursue after training a dog to enjoy doing what you want it to do. This is another energetic, motivational means to achieve dominance.
But it also assumes something about the dog. It must assume some form of docility and adaptability that enables that animal better to respond to commands than through the use of force. Obviously, this is markedly a better approach if you do not have the strength, confidence or experience to use force to achieve dominion.
However, this opposite method to the Dog Whisperer training style is not without requirements and trade-offs. Discernment is what either method requires of you.
You must know your dog, and not all dogs are the same. Some of them, for example, are highly pain-sensitive, not dominant-aggressive at all, even if they seem belligerent. Others are opportunists. If they want to rank socially, they will strive for dominance because they’re full of confidence and fear nothing.
Some of these won’t submit to you if you try to force them to do what they don’t wish to do. Some of them know better than you how much stronger they really are than you. Watch it! Indeed, dogs are not human, but they’re not trifles either.
To train a dog to heel and effectively obedience train it for other purposes, you must first understand and respect the beast. It has its own dignity.
If a dog is in a helpless condition of ignorance yet still pliable and impressionable enough to learn without the use of force, then be patient and diligent. Violently obedience-train your dog to like doing what you like for it to do. And be kind about it.
However, if a dog is in that helpless condition of ignorance yet no longer supple and suggestible, then save it from destruction. Violently obedience-train your dog to dislike doing what you dislike for it to do. And be strong about it.
Can you see the connection here?
Train your dog to mirror your principles. You are the model. That’s what complete dominion demands of you. Dogs are pack animals and require clear expectations and direction from their leaders. That’s you when you’re the one walking them, no one else.
Do not be simplistic and throw away half your toolbox because you presume all dogs to be the same and one method alone to work equally well with all breeds and cases at all times. Progressively gain maturity to grasp the significance of being ready to deal with all kinds of situations and dogs, if you’re going to be walking all kinds of dogs at various times. Use our free dog walker’s guide and begin learning.