Dog Training Tips: Praising Your Dog

Teaching Commands to your dog!

Way before you can even think about teaching your dog complex tricks, there are a few basics every dog and owner should accomplish. They really do help create a successful relationship between human and dog. Learning how to praise your dog correctly will only serve to help your success.

Praising Your Dog

Praising your dog is something we do when your dog gives the behaviour you want or require. Getting your praising technique right plays a vital role in training your dog correctly and successfully.

As the trainer, you need to use your voice to reward your dog. As soon as your dog completes the task required of him, praise him! There are different types of praising you can easily learn. Say you want your dog to bring a toy to you. When your dog has bought said toy to you, you should raise your voice when you are praising as if you are excited about something! However, if you are having a ‘search & find’ type of training session, you should use a lower, questioning tone of praise.

Another type of praise is using your touch when training your dog. Always try to remember though that a big hand coming down on the top of your dogs head will be seen as dominance, not praise. Try to avoid things that we as humans may find rewarding! Praising in the form of touch is probably best approached by mimicking what a mum would do naturally in the wild. She would lick her puppies. Obviously, we can’t go this far but a dog will view gentle stroking motions on his sides or back as rewarding.