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Training Your Puppy: Part 2
from: The Complete DogOne thing your puppy needs to feel is that he's valuable. It's wise to do your training sessions in a relatively quiet place. Since he's playful and excited, he'll easily get distracted by other people and activities taking place in the vicinity. If he's always bombarded with other sights and sounds, it's going to be hard for him understand from you that you enjoy being with him.
Use Words: He needs to learn how to associate the command with the action and the only way he'll do that is using the same word whenever you're guiding him to do what you want. A puppy can learn a quite a large vocabulary including words like "Outdoors," "Bedtime," "Go for a walk," and other basic commands.
Give Your Pup Rewards: Teaching requires you to first get his attention and then you need to reward him when he's performed what you've ask. You can reward him by giving him a treat, a pat, or through your voice. Giving him a treat will help to make your puppy training successful. When you guide his behavior, you've able to avoid pushing and pulling with your hands and all of the jerking and pulling on the leash.
Puppies learn much faster when they perform the activity themselves rather than having to be pushed or pulled into doing it. As he starts to catch on to what you mean by "Sit" or "Come" etc., you can use your hand or leash to perfect the performance, which keeps handling at a minimum. Timing is also very importance when using treats. Of course, your puppy won't know what you mean when issuing different commands when his training is just starting. Thus the only way he'll learn he's doing it right is when he receives a reward as soon as he he does it.
An example in using treat is to teach the command “Sit.” If you have a puppy who prefers bouncing around and hate to sit, you may have to start by rewarding a bending of the hind legs. If you were to wait until he sits all the way down with his bottom on the floor, you'd probably never get the job done. Once he's had a few rewards for partial sitting, he'll suddenly sit all the way, at which time you'll not only reward him, but heap praise on him as well.
Another example of rewarding with treats is the heeling exercise, one of the most difficult for most puppies to learn. Too often, it involves excessive jerking on the leash. The more a puppy is pulled, the more he's likely to resist and will often pull in the opposite direction. Their natural tendency is to run off and sniff around. Cheese tidbits are very effective at overcoming this problems of teaching a puppy to walk beside you. This works even better off-leash (but only for a minute at a time).
Once you start walking, the instant the puppy looks away from you, get his attention with your voice and give him a tidbit, which will keep him at your side for another few steps. Repeat this a few times during each session, reversing your direction and taking some turns. Then stop while you're both still performing well and give him lots of praise with your voice along with some pats.
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