concept

THE ABILITY OF our canine friends to learn amusing tricks, and even to carry out useful tasks on our behalf, is part of their enduring appeal. We can teach dogs to herd sheep, retrieve lost items, dance to music, guide and assist their disabled owners, and even to detect total strangers buried in the rubble of an earthquake zone. Dogs are very good at learning a wide range of skills.

Teaching a puppy right from wrong ought to be straightforward enough. Yet as attitudes towards dogs have changed, there seems to be increasing confusion over how to teach our puppies what is and is not acceptable.

Dog owners may be faced with conflicting advice. Training with food or other rewards may be dismissed by traditional-style trainers as too soft or permissive, whilst traditional-style methods may be dismissed by others as too harsh.

Puppies learn very fast indeed. They learn from you and from other members of their family, but they also learn from interacting with everything else around them. We all want our puppies to ‘sit’ and ‘come here’, to ‘lie down’ and to ‘stay’. Yet in the first few weeks in their new homes, what many puppies are learning is to ‘whine’ and ‘jump up’ and to ‘snatch’ and ‘bark’. Fortunately, we have a great deal of control over this process, provided we understand how it happens. For great results, you need to be clear how the mechanism of the learning process actually works – preferably before your new puppy sets foot inside your home.