Many people traditionally fall into the trap of trying to stop their dogs’ bad behaviors by reacting harshly to them. Your dog barks – you yell at him to stop barking. Your dog jumps on you – you knee him in the chest, etc. It’s human nature to react in this manner, but as we well know, it rarely works. Do you sometimes feel like you are a “NO Bird”, repeating “NO!” over and over again? It doesn’t work very well, does it? Yelling “NO!” doesn’t work for two reasons: 1) we do it so often that it just becomes background music the dog learns to ignore; 2) it may stop the behavior for a second, but the dog discovers there are no real negative consequences for continuing the behavior, so he keeps at it. So now that we know what doesn’t work, let’s talk about what does: Positive Reinforcement. In common terms, ‘positive’ means something good, and ‘reinforcement’ is something that, when added, increases the chance that a behavior will be repeated. In dog training, then, Positive Reinforcement means that your dog’s behavior makes something good happen. With Positive Reinforcement, your dog soon makes the connection that his actions make these good things happen, and WOW! what a breakthrough! Training with positive reinforcement is the key to obtaining your dog’s good behavior. Think in terms of this rule of thumb: for every “NO!” there should be five “YES!’s”. Instead of reacting when your dog does something bad, try to set him up to do something good which you can reward.
Posted on: Fri, 07 Jun 2013 16:21:05 +0000
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