Wuff Treatment for Dogs

Title: Wuff Treatment for Dogs
Author: Jerry Carpos

Wuff Treatment for Dogs
As anyone who has seen the popular BBC TV series "Dog
Borstal" will know, getting your dog to listen to you is,
well, all about communication. You may think you know how
to get through to your mutt – but if he isn't paying any
attention, he could be trying to tell you something...Once
you have established basic communication you are ready for
basic training. Establishing contact.

Your dog has to know right from wrong, before it can obey
you. Your first aim will be to let it know which behaviors
are acceptable and in which contexts. In order to do this,
you will have to learn to give clear, comprehensible
commands and to provide decent feedback, so that the animal
can understand if it has done what you wanted or not.

Understanding how to communicate with your dog is critical
to any training that you do. The goal of the handler is to
let the dog know which behaviors are correct in certain
situations, and which behaviors are not. The handler must
also learn to give commands to the dog effectively and
provide feedback so that the animal understands whether it
was successful or not. It is also very important that the
handler understands how to read the dog's reactions to
certain situations and to learn what motivates the dog to
obey or disobey.

There are four basic communications that the handler must
establish with the dog. For good behavior there is a reward
signal and a continue signal. The reward signal tells the
dog that they have behaved properly and deserve a reward,
and the continue signal tells the dog that they are
behaving properly and that they should continue to behave
in this manner in order to get a reward.

For bad behavior a no reward signal and a punishment signal
are used. The no reward signal tells the dog that it has
behaved incorrectly. Without a change in behavior, they
will not get a reward. A punishment signal tells the dog
that they will be punished if they continue their current
behavior.

The initial period of training with your dog will be the
most important phase of all, because it will establish the
pattern for all subsequent training. For this reason, you
should be well informed before embarking on the task – and
armed with a great deal of patience. It is no use rushing
the building up of trust between handler and dog, so try
not to be neurotic about it. The dog will come round
eventually, but only if you give yourself and the animal
time to develop and adapt. Consistency means everything to
your dog. If you have punished him once for a particular
type of behavior, for example, you must continue to do so
until he desists, otherwise the dog will become confused.
This will be distressing for him, because he really wants
to please you.

Once you and your dog have mastered the basics of sit,
stay, come and heel, you will be ready to embark on more
advanced training, such as tricks or "remotely" controlling
your dog's movements with distance commands for right and
left. It should be noted that human language in itself is
not always clearly distinguishable to the dog's ears. After
all, a dog's barking sounds pretty much the same to us,
whatever the animal is trying to say. For this reason,
"left" and "right" are probably inappropriate words to use,
whereas the command in Welsh, "come by" seems to work very
well for a left turn.

Some owners may wish to resort to an electric shock device
as an aid to obedience. These have been the center of a
certain amount of controversy in Britain recently, where a
private members bill tried to have them banned. Welfare
minister Ben Bradshaw has spoken out in favor of electric
collars, which he says some owners maintain have saved the
dog from nasty accidents or from being shot by farmers when
they stray onto land with livestock.

Funding is being provided for an investigation later this
year, aimed at establishing whether or not the collars can
make dogs aggressive.

About the Author:

Pet portrait artists like Jerry Carpos from
http://www.portraitkingdom.com can make eternal pet
portraits from your treasured photos. These eternal oil
painting portraits will doubtlessly surpass any language
used to train dogs.

.

__,_._,___