It makes sense that when your dog does something bad you scold them. Or you punish them with whatever punishment tactic you usually use. But does punishing a dog really work at getting your dog to obey you?
In psychology there are two types of psychological tactics that are used to get others to behave well:
- Positive Reinforcements
- Negative Reinforcements
Basically, positive reinforcement is when you treat your dog nice and spoil it whenever your dog does something good. For example, if your dog doesn’t jump on everybody like usual you would praise your dogs good behavior. Or if your dog decides to grab the ball and give it back to you, you’d give your dog praise.
This is establishing to your dog that whatever your dog did was awesome. You liked it and your dog now will begin to form a link to that action and your approval.
Negative reinforcement establishes fear into your dog. Whenever your dog does something bad you scold or punish your dog by, say, chaining your dog up. This is what most newbie dog owners do to train their dog.They get the dog to listen from fear of being punished.
Which is best?
I strongly believe that positive reinforcement is the best option. Negative reinforcement may have its use in certain things, however, for the majority of the dog training necessities it is not the best. Punishing dogs is just not very effective. It not only doesn’t work that great but it ruins the relationship that you have with your dog.
Establish a Strong Relationship
The better relationship you have with your dog the more likely your dog will listen to you. If your dog and you barely spend any time together and is an outside dog, how would you expect it to listen to you. It barely knows you!
One secret to training your dog is to establish this relationship and I’ll go into that in the next post! Till then, if you want more tips be sure to check out some more tips on dog training.
Learning the Right Info to Train Your Dog
I cannot stress enough the importance of learning the correct way to train a dog. So many owners try to train their dogs with partial info or even wrong info! I advise against this as you can end up making your dog behave worse if you don’t know what you’re doing.
In addition, if you train your dog using the techniques you learn and use them too harshly, you could end up causing dog psychological problems.
Phil Garfield has a Free Dog Training eBook for how to train dogs easily!