The biggest secret to dog training is understanding the process of positive reinforcement. All that’s really required after that is a lot of patience and being very consistent. Most dog behavior problems come from not understanding reinforcement or from not using it consistently.

To utilise it consistently, you’re going to need an abundance of patience. You need to appreciate the amount of time required to train a dog. You also need to understand that being consistent doesn’t just mean during a short training session but whenever you and anyone else are interacting with your dog. This means that you also need your family members and anyone who interacts with your dog to be consistent also.

Positive conditioning means that a positive reinforcement i.e. an enjoyable stimulus when your dog does some action will encourage him to perform that particular action again. It’s a sad fact that many owners positively reinforce problem behaviors in their dogs without being aware of it. For example, they enter the house, the dog is jumping up on them and they give affection to the dog. Affection is a positive reinforcement and so the dog is being encouraged to jump up on people.

I enjoy watching the Dog Whisperer on TV. One thing I notice is that owners are invariably reinforcing negative behaviors in their dogs without being aware of it. And this is in spite of the fact that they are fully aware of the process from watching Cesar on the program. The Dog Whisperer is very different which is why the dogs behave differently with him. He is always consistent and only give any attention to the dog when it is calm and behaving in a well-mannered fashion. In virtually every case that he helps, the problems are with the owner and his inconsistency.

It requires a lot of self-discipline and awareness to restrain from giving your dog affection when he is doing an unwanted behavior. Any attention is better than no attention to a dog. This means that, unfortunately, shouting at your dog may positively reinforce the behavior even though your intention is the opposite of that. So, the best response to unwanted behaviors in your dog may be to ignore them by turning away from your dog and giving no attention.

It’s more effective to focus on reinforcing positive behaviors rather than focusing on using negative reinforcement for unwanted behaviors. As the dog is encouraged more and more in positive behaviors, less time will be given by him to negative behaviors which go unrewarded.

Obviously, you may have to stop your dog doing unwanted behaviors For example, if he jumps on the food counter, you can just pull him off.

How do you reinforce behaviors you want to encourage? Possible rewards are tasty treats, affection or a toy to play with. Using small tasty treats is probably the most efficient method. The treat needs to be given as close in time to the behavior as possible. This is where using clicker training makes this process easier. The clicker sound is used to mark the behavior precisely as it happens and the treat comes immediately afterwards. However, clicker training is a whole subject in itself but well worth looking into since it will supercharge your training.

Read more about the Dog Training Secrets, about clicker training with dogs and about dealing with dog behavior problems in general.