Advice for Training Your Dog

No matter what breed of dog you have, training can be difficult. There are many things that need to be addressed as soon as it comes to live with you, from the most basic things, such as making it understand that it cannot use your home as bathroom, to more complex things like getting it to understand how to approach visitors without jumping and barking. All of this is going to take work on your part. The most common reason that people do not train their dogs well is because they do not understand at first how much they need to do, and so they do not take all of the necessary steps. Any dog can be trained if you are willing to do what you need to do to train it, regardless of breed or temperament. 
The biggest thing to remember is that there is a certain time commitment that you need to stick to. You cannot expect to spend five minutes getting your dog to understand that it shouldn’t jump when someone new comes to the door, for example. The dog is not going to catch on that quickly. To make this new behavior into a habit, it takes a lot more time.

Similarly, consistency is quite important. Ideally, you want to work on things with your dog every day. You do not have to do it for long – ten minutes is fine – if you just do it each day. This way, the dog knows what to expect and begins to form habits around the type of behavior that you want. This works for simple tricks like sitting and rolling over as well. If you are inconsistent and you only do it from time to time, the dog is never going to catch on and learn what the expected behavior is.

Finally, you have to learn the line between positive reinforcement and punishment. For things that the dog does wrong, you do need to use mild punishments or the dog will never understand that the behavior is bad. You cannot just give it a treat when it is not chewing the rug, for instance, assuming that it will know that refraining from chewing is good. You have to show it that chewing is not accepted. To teach it tricks, though, punishments just scare the dog, so you only want to use treats and positive reinforcement.