Nurturing a pet dog involves patience and consistency in your actions in relation to your dog’s behavior. This will help your dog understand right from wrong easily. You can train your dog using two methods. These are positive dog training and negative dog training. Positive dog training involves rewarding your dog when a desired action is performed or a desired behavior is displayed. Dogs are social animals and they enjoy affection. Affection can thus be used as a positive reinforcement for your dog’s behavior. This technique is also referred to as positive reinforcement dog training. What happens with positive reinforcement is that it creates a link in the dog’s thinking process between the particular action performed and the reward received for it. When your dog behaves in a particular way, you reward your dog with affection or with any form of a gift. This gift may be giving your dog its favorite food or giving it a chew toy to play with. When training using positive techniques you will need to be heavily involved in the action itself. You may be training your dog to jump over an obstacle or, more simply, to sit when it is being told to sit. You will have to coax you dog into performing the action you desire based on the words you use. Once the dog has performed the action, you should immediately introduce to positive element. This is crucial. You should also not use the same positive link for other good behavior while training your dog. This can be done later when your dog is trained, but during training some consistency and repetition is required.
Negative dog training can be difficult for some dog owners, particularly indulgent ones. This is used when your dog displays a type of behavior that is undesirable. You may want to stop your dog jumping at guests or damaging the upholstery of your sofa. In such situations, you will need to introduce a negative response as a consequence of your dog’s action. Some people simply shout and stop their dog from the action being performed. Others may tie the dog’s leash and make the dog sit quietly for a few minutes as punishment. Physical abuse is not at all recommended and can be illegal. This will also scare your dog rather than training it.
Generally, negative techniques are used to eliminate bad behavior while positive techniques are used to encourage good behavior or to train your dog to perform a certain action.