Understanding Positive Reinforcement In Dog Training
The biggest secret to training your dog is understanding the process of positive reinforcement. All that’s really required after that is lots of patience and consistency. Most problem behaviors in dogs arise from not understanding reinforcement or from not applying it consistently.
To use it consistently, you will need an abundance of patience. You need to understand the time and effort needed to train a dog. You must also appreciate that you need to be consistent every time you are with your dog, not just during training sessions. This means that you also need your family members and anyone who interacts with your dog to be consistent also.
Positive conditioning means that a positive reinforcement i.e. pleasant stimulus when your dog does some action will encourage him to perform that particular action again. Many dog owners will give lots of positive reinforcements when their dog is doing unwanted behaviors. For example, they give affection to their dog as it jumps up on them when they enter the house. Affection is a positive reinforcement and so the dog is being encouraged to jump up on people.
I enjoy watching the Dog Whisperer on TV. One thing I notice is that owners are invariably reinforcing negative behaviors in their dogs without being aware of it. And this is in spite of the fact that they are fully aware of the process from watching Cesar on the program. The Dog Whisperer is very different which is why the dogs behave differently with him. He is always consistent and only give any attention to the dog when it is calm and behaving in a well-mannered fashion. In nearly all cases that he helps, the problems are with the owner and his inconsistency.
Lots of awareness and self-discipline are needed to stop yourself giving affection to a misbehaving dog. You also need to be aware that any attention, even when it’s shouting at your dog “stop barking”, may act as a positive reinforcement. So, it may be best to respond to unwanted behaviors by ignoring them and turning away from your dog.
Focusing on reinforcing positive behavior is more effective than trying to negatively reinforce unwanted behavior. The more you reinforce positive behaviors, the less the unwanted behaviors will occur.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t stop your dog doing unwanted behaviors. It just means that it’s not part of your training process – it’s just damage control. For example, if he jumps on the food counter, you can just pull him off.
How do you positively reinforce actions you want to encourage? You reward the behavior by giving a tasty treat or by giving affection. Using small tasty treats is probably the easiest method. The treat needs to be given as close in time to the behavior as possible. Because of the importance of timing, the use of a clicker makes the reward process clearer to your dog. The clicker sound is used to mark the behavior precisely as it happens and the treat comes immediately afterwards. I encourage you to look more into the whole subject of clicker training since it does streamline process of positive reinforcement.
Read more about the Secrets to Dog Training, about clicker training for dogs and about dealing with behavior problems in dogs in general.
