You can start training your dog as soon as he is with you, as long as he has spent the required time (3 months) with his mother and siblings.

 

If you think about it, the dog from birth already starts to learn new things. It learns from its mother and siblings: when they play, when they eat, when they explore the environment, when they do their needs, etc. Of course, puppies have a short attention span, but simple obedience commands such as “sit,” “lie down,” and “stay still,” as well as many other things can be learned as early as 11 to 12 weeks of age.

 

Dog training from a superficial point of view is that your dog learns certain behaviors or skills. In this sense, we can find some types of training such as:

 

  • Sports training: a specialty of canine training oriented to sports competition for dogs such as Agility, French Ring, VPG, etc.
  • Defense training: involves training the dog to defend its guardian. Such as defense dogs for battered women, for example.
  • Medical alert dog training: dogs trained to detect high blood sugar, cancer, epileptic seizures, etc.
  • Basic dog obedience training: consists, at a superficial level, in your dog learning a series of signals that will facilitate the handling in the day-to-day, both when he is loose and tied up. For example, teaching him “come” so that he will come back when you release him or “stay” so that he will wait while you go into the self-service store.

 

There are different requirements for dog obedience training in phoenix depending on what the objective is. For example, dog obedience training in phoenix will be further if you train a service dog (as is the case of guide dogs), sport competition dogs (for example, in agility), or companion dogs with no particular function other than to be tremendously loved.

 

Although there may be dogs more intelligent than others, the truth is that good obedience will never be complete if the person who educates the dog does not have some basic knowledge in the levels of canine obedience.

Ancient Obedience: Dominance

Probably, you have seen some chapter of the dog charmer; he works with ancient obedience based on dominance. Here it is stipulated that we must be a “leader” for our dog, and techniques that remind us of natural canine communication such as marking are used. However, this technique arises from a study carried out with wolves in the last century, and it is estimated that any disobedient dog wants to be the dominant of the pack formed by him and us. Therefore, if we are not specialists, using dominance is a grave mistake.

Current Obedience: Positive Reinforcement

Keeping a positive and confident attitude helps the receiver understand us and be more predisposed to follow our indications. Positive reinforcement has no other secret than rewarding a dog immediately after he properly complies with a command or behaves as we wish. It is not always necessary to use a reward as a snack; words of encouragement or caresses are also helpful. This technique completely rejects punishment (since it causes stress in the dog) and invites us to use other ways of acting that do not cause discomfort in your relationship. Remember that eliminating punishment from a dog’s education does not mean letting him do whatever he wants. You must guide your dog and teach him how to do it.

On the other hand, it will also be interesting to point out that non-verbal communication is fundamental for obedience. We should not only use a “sit,” but it will be handy to relate it also with a gesture. Dogs understand better a concrete physical signal.