Is your dog’s behavior driving you crazy? Perhaps the majority of the time they are a great dog but sometimes they react badly or suffer from extreme anxiety or aggression.
Whether your dog has bad manners, destructive habits, fear issues or is aggressive towards dogs and people behavior modification can help your dog. Before you start a behavior modification training program with your dog you need to assess are YOU doing something that may be part of your dog’s problem?
If you are honest with yourself, we find many times it is the human that is a part of the issue. At K9 Culture Dog Training we repeat the following phrase often: We CREATE many of the behavior problems with our dog that we have to correct later.
How are YOU creating dog behavior problems? Most of the time it comes down to consistency. Dogs (and humans) thrive on routines or consistency. The more consistent and predictable you are with your dog the more they can learn to depend on those rules or behaviors to be the correct or incorrect ones. Many dog behavior problems begin when we sometimes allow them to do certain behaviors and sometimes correct them or get frustrated with them for doing the same behavior.
This confuses your dog. Confused dogs do not do much better in guessing what they should or should not do than we humans do. A sometimes command, meaning you sometimes allow a behavior or sometimes do not require them to actually obey the command leads to the dog having to make decisions on what commands to obey and when they should or should not act on a behavioral impulse. That is setting your dog up to fail!
We help dogs with behavior modification every day. We start with an owner assessment, environmental assessment and then evaluate the dog’s ability to focus and manage their impulses.
Once we have this baseline of data to work from, we can quickly start showing and teaching dogs with bad behavior issues how to better manage their impulses and make better choices. Dogs do make choices, so we can give them the skills to make good choices or leave it up to them to decide how to act. Leaving it up to a dog to make behavior choices is what often leads to the issues most of our dog training clients have with their dog.
If it were just a matter of showing and teaching the dog what to do, dog training would be a fast process. The real work is the time-consuming part of Repetition. Repetition creates understanding. But we cannot just have a dog repeat an action 500 plus times in a single session or even a single day, for the drudgery of that action would cause the dog to resent and dread that behavior.
Effective dog training must be fun and engaging for the dog. The more active and fun your dog’s training is, the faster they learn and deeper the set of new behaviors become. This is key in getting long lasting results from training your dog.
K-9 Culture’s dog training facility is designed to keep the dog engaged, entertained and when needed get one on one focus with their trainer by removing other distractions until they are ready to add a layer of intense distractions to proof their new skills.
Dog behavior modification is not just about teaching a dog what NOT to do, it is just as much about showing them what to do instead and making that choice a dependable and repeatable option for your dog.
If you would like to schedule an evaluation and assessment and a tour of Texas’ largest and most professional indoor dog training facility we’d love to meet you and your pup. Meet one of our trainers by clicking on our trainer’s calendar
The K-9 Culture Family
A Dog that is a JOY to Live With!