6 Tips To Choose Your Professional Dog Training
11 Mar 2010
It can be overwhelming when trying to determine who’s truly qualified to look after your dog with so many advertising in the field of professional dog training today. What to look for when choosing a professional to help you with dog training:
- A good reputation, ask around and get recommendations from your vet, other dog owners, or local kennel clubs.
- Experience. - Inquire about their background, i.e. number of year’s experience.
- A real love of and devotion to dogs.
- Extensive and up to date knowledge. Dedicated trainers keep themselves updated by attending dog training and animal behavior courses, conferences, seminars and workshops.
- Their training methodology and handling skills. A good trainers first concern should be the dogs well being.
- Memberships with reputable associations, organizations and training clubs.
General dog obedience tips
Both of you and your dog should be positively enjoying the experience of the training. Never begin the training if you are not in the right mood for it. Always reward your dog for obeying your commands promptly! A reward is anything that your dog wants and is willing to work for. Treats are an obvious reward but other rewards could be verbal praise and toys. Several shorter sessions are usually better than one long one. Training should not involve any negative components or punishment. There should be no shouting, no hitting or smacking, no chain jerking on choke chains or collars, and absolutely no electric shocking! Each training session should be enjoyable and positive with rewards for jobs well done.
Training with head collars
Pulling on the lead is one of the few unpleasant experiences of bringing up a new puppy or dog. Over the last few years, using a head collar for dog training has become very popular. Training with a head collar does have some advantages over the traditional training collar. It is important that your dog introduced properly to the collar and the head collars are fitted correctly although it’s very simple to use. Compare to traditional training collar, head collars are generally more intuitive. In difficult situation, head collars are very effective to controlling dogs.
