Our Top 7 Puppy Training Tips
Puppy training isn’t always easy. Potty training issues, mouthing and nipping, and barking are all common puppy behaviour issues that we are called upon to help resolve.
No matter what the breed, there are no stubborn puppies. Every puppy is an infant member of a foreign species who is trying his very best to learn how to adapt to living in a human family. We can make it easy for him by preventing behaviour we don’t want, and teaching him the behaviour that we want in little successive steps.
If we make our lessons easy, but challenging and rewarding enough to keep puppy interested, he will learn that training is fun, and he will want to do more of it. Any puppy can learn really fast if we always smooth the way by setting him up for success. Here are 7 crucial things you must do to make it easy for your puppy to learn anything really fast.
Try These Training Tips With Your Puppy
1. Start With A Defined Goal
Start by defining exactly what you want to teach your puppy. It could be potty training, learning to sit or lie down, or walking nicely on a loose leash. It could even be getting Puppy to stop nipping and biting. Starting with a well-defined goal, “I want Puppy to sit” when he wants something will be more helpful than “I want Puppy to stop biting me” for giving your puppy the information he needs to do something other than biting when he wants something.
2. Strategize with baby steps
Break your training goal down into manageable baby steps that are easy for Puppy to figure out. For instance, if you want your puppy to walk nicely on a loose leash, start by standing in one spot and mark and reward your puppy when he’s right beside you. Repeat this about 10 times. Take a break, and then repeat. This time take just one step away from your puppy, encouraging to follow you. Mark and reward 10 times. Take a break. Next time, take a couple of steps away and mark and reward in position. To get loose leash walking, you’ll do this in a non-distracting environment until you can walk around the house with puppy on a loose leash. The next step of the plan will be in the backyard where there are more distractions.
3. Prevent/ignore/don’t reward unwanted behavior
Practice makes perfect, whether it’s behavior you want or don’t want. Preventing unwanted behavior is the best way to prevent bad habits from forming or to get rid of bad habits. For example, keeping a houseline on your young puppy will give you a means of getting him out of potential trouble when he’s excited and nippy without putting hands on him, making it likely he’ll nip at your hands. Your puppy is experimenting with his new world. He’s seeing what works and doesn’t work to get things he wants. Food, toys, and interaction are all things that puppies want. If you inadvertently reward any behaviour you don’t want with any of these things, you can be sure your puppy will do more of it.
Even saying “no,” and giving puppy a stern “no”! can be rewarding for a puppy because now he knows he can get your attention by doing whatever it was. Instead, it’s a good idea to immediately stop all interaction with your puppy, look away from him, and physically move away from him when he does something like nipping you. You’ll also have to spend time every day teaching him a repertoire of things he can do instead, like bringing a toy to get you to play tug or fetch with him. Your puppy is an infant. Physically correcting him will erode his ability to trust you and will teach him that humans communicate with rough behavior.
4. Puppies learn in the context of their immediate environment
You and I learned from a very young age that when we learned something in one location, it was the same everywhere we went. SO if we learned the word “sit” in the kitchen, it would mean put your bottom down in the living room, in the backyard or at preschool. his is called “generalization”. Dogs don’t learn new things that way. At least not at first. Instead they learn new things in context of their immediate environment. So you teach a puppy to sit in the kitchen, he won’t necessarily understand it means the same thing in the living room, or when your friend comes to visit or when you have a leash in your hand or when your partner tells him to sit. For this reason, it’s your job to teach your puppy to generalize by teaching him in one environmental context, and then reteaching him from the beginning in several new environmental contexts until the goal behaviour becomes generalized. Don’t worry, after he learns 3 to 6 different behaviour cues this way, he’ll probably start to generalize new behaviors on his own.
5. Make “Prevent, don’t correct” the mantra for training your puppy
Instead of correcting unwanted behavior, prevent it from happening in the first place and set the stage so the puppy is always likely to succeed. For example, if you are teaching puppy to potty outside, confining or supervising him, scheduling food and water and taking him outside hourly for potty breaks will help him learn, whereas scolding him for accidents could confuse him and slow the learning process.
6. Teach cues with hand signals first
Dogs are creatures of action. Dogs don’t have a verbal language, although they’ll readily learn ours if we teach them patiently. Instead of communicating with words, dogs look for physical cues, and it’s easiest for them to learn this way. Because dogs don’t have any natural way to understand verbal cues, it’s a bit crazy to keep repeating them. Start by teaching him to watch your hands by using a food lure to get your dog in the position you want him in. When he gets into position mark with a clicker or a verbal reward marker. Repeat 6-10 times. Now get the scent of the treat on your hands and lure him into position and then quickly mark and deliver reward with your other hand. Repeat 6-10 times.
Start to have the hand signal closer to where you’ll want it to be in real life. Now start to Incorporate the verbal cue into your praise after the behaviour happens. The next step will be trying the verbal cue as you do the hand signal. After about 10 repetitions, your puppy will start to associate the verbal cue with the action. Now your puppy has learned a word! Every verbal cue he has a positive association with will make him more eager to learn what those strange sounds humans make mean. Remember- don’t repeat verbal cues, especially when your puppy is learning. You want him to learn “sit”(and not “sit, sit, sit, sit” means “put your bottom down”.
7. Always be gentle and kind
Always be gentle when handling your puppy. For one thing, he is learning how to behave among humans from you. If you play roughly or use physical corrections with your puppy, the only things he’ll learn is that humans like rough play, and the way to interact with them is to play roughly. Your puppy’s brain is physically incapable of learning after he’s been physically corrected, so using any type of physical correction only serves to teach your puppy that you’re unpleasant and can be scary at times.
If you can’t be home all day with your puppy, you can still get puppy training. We’re here to help with Our exclusive Super Puppy Homeschool Program. Click here to learn more about it.
