Puppy Training Tips and Dogs

puppy training/obedience?

I have a 9-week old Shiba Inu, and as adorable as he is, I want him to be a disciplined, social, and loyal companion. However, this is my first puppy, and I don’t know WHAT or HOW to teach him.. I don’t know what to do.. i have the potty training down, but.. wut else do i teach him? Yes,, he has a crate.

Hello,

Yes, training a dog to sit, stay, lay teaches him obedience because he learns that he must listen to you in order to receive the rewards he is looking for. The best way too keep dogs in obedience practice is to use these commands as a part of everyday life once the commands are learned.

I am a dog trainer so this is long but you will be very happy with it’s contents, I promise. I also guarantee it’s results.

Just so you know, it will take a lot of time to work on the progression of these exercises. It is VERY IMPORTANT you be patient and consistant. It can take up to two weeks to work on the first cue and have it learned. However, the more you progress and then move onto the next exercise, the less time it will take to progress once the command is learned because he will know what you are looking for and he will be very aware of what he will get when he offers what you ask for.

Use small moist and very fragrant treats, you can buy some at the store, or you can use pea sized broken pieces of hot dog (don’t cook the hot dog in mocrowave or anything, hot dog is already cooked, and “uncooked” or “heated” will be easier to break into pieces.

*NOTE: Before you can ever progress to the next level of a command, the dog must be able to offer a behavior 9 out of 10 times perfectly.

Dogs who are trained with positive reinforcement training are a happy dog because they accomplish things and get rewarded which builds their confidance, and they build a great relationship with you because they have become confidant BECAUSE of you and they will be very very happy to perform these cues for you.

sit exercise:

With some treats on your non dominant hand and one treat in your dominant hand, gently rest your palm under the tip of your dogs chin so the treat is at their nose and they can smell it and know it’s there, then patiently and carefully, gently push on the dogs chim pushing his head up and straightening his neck so to speak. At first he’ll back up a little. But the more you do this (stopping and starting from beggining if he’s not sitting after a couple of seconds, you don’t want to stress him out) he won’t want to be backing up anymore, and he’ll choose to sit instead. The VERY INSTAND his toosh touches the ground say “GOOD” first, wait a second, and then give him the treat. You want GOOD and treat to be sepparate because GOOD is a reward marker. He learns that every time he hears GOOD, whatever it is he is doing at that very moment will soon be rewarded with a treat (later on once he is basically perfect and offering the command instantly withouth the lureing, ween him off of treat and start giving him lots of praise and really great petting because no matter what you will always be able to offer praise and attention at a moments notice, plus you want your dog to learn which behaviors will receive this attention which is the reward he is most seeking.)

Stay is an automatic command along with sit. You must work on sit first, once he has that down pat and offers it 9 out of 10 times without lure, put 3 seconds in between the SIT command and the GOOD reward marker, (the GOOD for this exercise no longer marks the sitting cause he knows that now, it now marks the waiting patiently while in the sit) then give him the treat and say RELEASE at the same time you give him the treat. (I prefer release because it is not a commonly used term like okay, and if you don’t want to release your dogs just yet, see someone, say okay in agreement with someome, you’ve accidentally released your dogs from the command.)after you have worked on this and he is staying in the sit without moving until you give the release 9 out of 10 times, add 3more seconds on. Continue doing this until you are at 24 seconds of perfect staying until released. At this point he will realize that he is not to move, no matter how long, until you say so. At any time, he gets out of position before you release him, stop the command, turm your attention away from him (this is negative punishment – the removal of attention since attention is what he is seeking) give him a moment to come around to you, sit down and give you eye contact. When he does this, wait whatever seconds you are on, then say good, but DO NOT give him a treat or any petting, he has to learn that disobeying does not get rewarded. Then the next attempt at the exercise will most likely go very well, and you can mark the behavior and reward.

Once you have this down, DOWN is the next to work on. When he is in SIT he will obviously stay since you have worked on that with him and he is good at it now, have the treat in front of his nose, DO NOT let him have the treats, but lure his nose slowly down toward the groud directly in front of his paws, once he is there, slowly move the treat along the ground away from his paws forward, he will most likely stay where his butt is and lower his body to continue reaching toward the treat, THE VERY INSTANT his body is fully on the ground, say GOOD and the reward. Just like stay work on this until he gets it 9 times out of 10 without the lure. When he stays for however long you want him give him a small pile of 8 treats, and put them between his paws and say good while he eats them this way staying down keeps him down longer and is very rewarding for being down.

Once you have these commands taught, you can deffinately use the sit/stay for letting the dog out doors. You must practice it first, a dog does not know what to offer unless you teach him. Practice sit/stay at a door, slowly open the door, if his rear end comes up, close the door and start over, after a couple of times he’ll realize that staying seated keeps the door open, once the door is open, you can say RELEASE and let him outside, same thing with coming in, and with eating. Have him sit while the food bowl is in yor hand, set it down, the instant his rear end comes up (no matter what point you are at with putting the bowl down, if you are mid way:) pick the bowl back up and start over, a couple of times and he’ll realize that staying seated will let the food come down. The give him the release. Work on staying at the door before you work on staying for food. This helps him learn that staying for something in particular will get him what he wants and it will be easier since food is harder to keep dogs away from.

GOOD LUCK, I hope I helped. If you have any questions feel free to ask for it, I will be more than happy to give you assistance.
~C~

ADD: Puppies will play bite and don’t know not to with people so you have to teach them that biting is unacceptable. The best way to get your dogs to stop doing something is to ignore it, because any kind of attention is attention and attention is what they are looking for. Don’t jerk your hand away but sort of slowly pull it away and remove your attention. Throughout the day every day, when he is laying down and being calm, or when he is not biting, pet him. Show him that he is gonna get rewarded for good behavior no matter the situation. For every negative attention there needs to be five positive attentions. So the more and more you reward him for being calm, they will outweigh the bad and he’ll easily see the pattern that good gets rewarded and bad gets ignored. NEVER USE CRATE FOR PUNISHMENT. If he does something bad, then it is something that happened and there’s nothing that can be done about it now. The only form of punishment should be the removal of attention wich is called negative punishment. Negative in the form of a minus sign, ie: subtracting something, what are you subtracting? Attention. Positive reinforcement is the training technique, positive as in addition sign, what are we adding? attention. If every time he does something wrong and you put him in the crate for it, then what is he going to think when you put him in the crate cause you need to leave the house? He’s gonna think he did something wrong when he did nothing wrong. For example: if he poops in the house. He doesn’t know he’s doing something wrong, he simply had to go, it’s just too bad you didn’t get to him in time to take him out. Now you know what to look for and to add an extra bathroom break in the day. Bathrooms for dogs are not as readily available like bathrooms for people, should you be spanked or sent to your room because you couldn’t hold it in and had an accident? No, same thing goes for the dog, let him out, and while he’s out clean up the mess, spray petzyme down on the spopt to get rid of the stain and odor, and better luck next time. However, when he IS in the crate it is important that you ignore the whining. When it stops, you can take him out, this way he doesn’t learn that whining will get him what he wants. If you respond to whining, he’ll whine more often and for a lot longer when you DO want to ignore him. Nip it in the bud as soon as possible to keep correction training to a minimum. Let me know if you have any more questions, I’ll send you an emial to let you know I’m adding something here, since I am not limited on the amount of characters I can use and I can thus explain things more thoroughly.

~C~

Puppy Training Video – Puppy Discipline (Episode 4)