The puppy is like a sponge ready to take on any new challenges. They’re inquisitive and learn new skills easily. It’s important the owner get its right from the start and is consistent in the training to help the puppy develop good habits. Some puppies will be motivated by food, fuss or both. To give the puppy a good start we need to teach some basic commands to help them understand what we expect of them and how they need to behave in certain situations.
Here are some basic commands we need to teach the puppy: Heel, sit, down, stay, leave, no & recall.
Teaching the puppy obedience must be a relevant command which is used in every day tasks such as staying beside the handler before crossing the road. Or getting the puppy to sit calmly before you put the lead on to go for a walk. This lead can be associated with excitement and pleasure for the puppy. This is known as classical conditioning. Over excitement when picking up the lead is an undesirable behaviour. Potentially a trigger for their owner who is leaving the house causing Seperation anxiety. In this instance, the sit or down stay command could be implemented and used to communicate to the dog stay in the house and settle. The intent of the stay “command” is I’ll be back soon. We’ll talk more about Seperation anxiety later in the course.
Having the dog heeling on leash is one of the desired behaviours most dog owners want to achieve. A pulling dogs can be not pleasurable to work and cause injury to the dog and the dog walker via repetitive pulling on the limbs and muscles.
There may be a time to ask the dog or command the dog to leave an items cause dangerous or poisonous for them. Or simply a toy they are playing with. Some dogs become toy proud and learn aggression to prevent anyone else getting it. This is known as “resource holding value”. The benefit out weighs the cost of confrontation and injury.
Recall again is very desired command as we like to let our dogs off leash so they can enjoy them selves. However, there is a lot of distractions such as other dogs, people, animals, water, food they can be lured to go towards.
The “no” commandis a corrective tool to let them no what they have done is wrong. For example, withdrawing a reward to negatively punish a behaviour. So taking the reward away form an undesirable behaviour will make it extinct. Other end of the spectrum if you were to use a water pistol, shout at your dog and use a choke chain this would be classed as positive punishment. As we are adding a punishment to stop an unwanted behaviour.
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