Here are two keys to helping your best friend become a well behaved member of the family – Management and Exercise.

Management – One of the most important strategies in training your dog is management. This means setting up the environment to make correct behaviors easy and incorrect behaviors difficult or impossible. Whether as puppies or newly adopted adults, dogs don’t come knowing the rules for living in your house – they need to be gently and carefully taught what’s okay and what’s off limits.

Baby gates, play pens, closed doors, tethers, leashes and harnesses all help to keep your dog where you want her and prevent her from making mistakes. A dog can’t chew, dig, jump on, or eat what she can’t reach. While your dog is safely confined, providing appropriate chewies and food toys helps build and strengthen those behaviors into good habits. While she’s being carefully supervised, play games that reward sitting, coming when called, staying in place and so forth start to build habits out of those behaviors. All the while, your pup is too busy paying attention to you or excavating food from her toys to go off and dig up the carpet or gnaw on your grandmother’s first print edition of “Jane Eyre.”

Exercise – One of my favorite training proverbs says, “A tired dog makes a happy owner.” Another variation says, “A tired dog is a well behaved dog.” Both point to the [Read more...]