Train N Treat: effective, humane and rewarding way to play, learn and train with your dog!

Starting Tuesday 1 Oct 2013, cheerfuldogs.com will post a "Train N Treat" column. This column will be available every alternate Tuesday until "the cows come home". We hope that you'll enjoy the little training secrets that Chief Cheery Officer Kiyo, will share with you. If he hasn't approved the training method, it's not going into our trainer's toolkit :)!

Today, we'll look at dog-friendly training for enlightened dog lovers!

“Your dog can learn without fear or pain, and so can you. Traditional training methods tend to be punitive in nature, making use of corrective techniques to make a dog behave. But dog training has since come a long way from these traditional methods – we now have a better understanding of how dogs and other animals learn. Choke collars or chains, prong or pinch collars, shock collars - these tools are unnecessary in effective dog training.

Pay attention to your dog,
if you want it to pay attention to you

Humane and dog-friendly training works by motivating a dog to do something you like, rather than punishing it for doing something you don't. While dogs share a common ancestry with wolves, they are not wolves waiting for an opportunity to take over our lives. Hence there's really no need for us to be 'alpha', 'pack leaders', or 'dominant' to our dog. What we do need to do is to understand our dog’s behaviour and communicate with it in a way that motivates it to do what we want, in a way they find rewarding.

As dog owners, we have a choice - would we like our dogs to follow us because they want to, or do we want them to obey us out of fear? The choice is clear.”