Puppy Obedience Training For Shy Puppies

Puppy Obedience Training For Shy Puppies – There are a number of common mistakes that people tend to make with their reactive, fearful, shy or protective dogs that unfortunately slow down the learning process and prevent dogs from reaching their full potential.

Here’s what you need to know when trying to rehabilitate and train dogs that are reactive, nervous, fearful or defensive. In many cases, you can turn around shy/fearful dogs and improve reactive and defensive dogs in as little as 30 days!

Puppy Obedience Training For Shy Puppies

Focusing too much on traditional obedience games like “look”, “touch” or “walk with me” can slow down the learning process! Why? Because dogs often focus too much on training and miss out on important socialization experiences.

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While it’s not bad to get your dog to focus on you, “look at me” by touching or holding, if your focused dog is distracted by the people, places, and things around him, the coping strategy won’t work. have beneficial effects.

The problem is that dogs have to learn to accept their triggers and relax. Instead of noticing the world around them and learning to take in the sights and sounds of the environment through dedicated socialization efforts, real learning is avoided because dogs are constantly distracted from their phobias.

At Zen Dog Training, we teach our clients positive reinforcement designed to keep dogs focused. We reward dogs that learn to watch, walk, or walk with us when they feel stressed. However, if this is your only training option, your dog will not learn to better understand his fears and phobias because he is constantly distracted from his feelings.

While refocusing dogs and distracting them with obedience exercises is the best method to avoid problems, only a desensitization and conditioning program has been shown to help resolve anxiety. This means focusing on helping your dog learn to deal with his fears and phobias!

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It’s always easier to avoid problems, but if you don’t do resistance exercises every day, you won’t see results.

Too often, a well-meaning person forces their dog into frightening situations by pulling it to greet a stranger, or forcing it to greet a houseguest, visitor, or child on a walk. Not only can this overwhelm them and make the dogs’ fear worse, but they can also bite people because fearful dogs who feel trapped can explode!

Remember: Even if your dog looks good on the outside, he may be nervous and scared on the inside. Forcing them to greet visitors, children or new people on walks when they are not ready is never a good idea. Think about yourself. If you are afraid of rats or snakes, would it be better or worse to keep them?

Zen Dog Trainer helps you find ways to gently reveal your dog’s phobias in controlled situations and at a therapeutic level. For more information on how to help dogs who are shy, fearful or defensive, check out the Becoming a Zen Dog podcast.

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In many cases, training exercises are not as effective as they could be because it is difficult to rehearse the exact situation. People often try to encourage strangers to give their dog treats or to interact safely with the dog, but the problem will not be solved because these strangers may not behave in a way that will help your dog feel comfortable with new people.

Because exercise involves other people or strangers, exercise can be made more difficult by triggers such as joggers and joggers, strangers in hoodies, or people wearing sunglasses. To correct phobias, you need to repeat the exact situations that make your dog nervous and carefully set up a teaching moment where you can work on correcting his shyness. Therefore, the training focuses on carefully thought out teaching moments to strategically work towards correcting fears and phobias.

Creativity is key. If the trigger is people with hoods, people with sunglasses, or people with hidden faces, you need to practice this situation.

A great way to practice is to have family members or friends dress up as strangers. Having family members come to the house in hoodies and cover your dog with treats, then pull back the hood to reveal a good friend is a fun way to get people to help your dog feel less defensive.

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At Zen Dog Training, we teach clients to change the purpose of walks from exercise and stimulation to socialization and learning to manage fears and phobias. If the goal of the walk is to address fearful behavior, it is important to spend 15-20 minutes a day on socialization and bonding techniques. Just having a dog take treats while standing near a park or running track can do wonders in scary situations.

There are some popular dog trainers on TV and the Internet who warn people against “rewarding fear by giving dogs treats when they are afraid.” Unfortunately, dogs whose owners follow this bad advice will not get better! Why? Because just like in humans, systematic desensitization and conditioning has been shown to be the best way to deal with fear-based anxieties!

At Zen Dog Training, we call this a coping strategy. A 30-day intensive program where you do 10 or more short workouts (1-2 minutes) with 10-20 mini-workouts per day. This coping strategy can have almost miraculous results. In fact, I have personally seen dogs become completely calm from fear within a month of training!

The main thing is patience, lots of repetitions and using amazing treats! Expensive treats are essential. This means your dog will go wild with the meaty treats. The secret is to choose treats that can be easily cut or broken into small pieces without too much effort. Here is a link to my favorite foods on Amazon. We recommend putting together a treat bag with several types of treats and giving them generously to your dog to help him feel better in scary situations.

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Just eating a nervous dog in a scary situation means that you are moving in the right direction. If a dog is afraid to eat too much of a treat, this is an important sign that he is overwhelmed and may need to move away from that particular trigger.

Using valuable meat treats as part of a training plan is the easiest way to have tremendous success in improving your dog’s fear and building his confidence! Here is a great article to help explain the power of treats.

Mistake number five: Not doing enough reps and timing to correct fears and phobias.

Helping a dog overcome his phobias can seem overwhelming. At Zen Dog Training, we teach clients to organize 10 small training sessions a day. Short sessions of 1-5 minutes where the dogs are in a comfortable place and exposed to these triggers at a tolerable level while people exercise and give them handfuls of small treats will quickly relieve anxiety.

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Everyone should focus on doing 10 mini sessions a day. Treats should be broken up into small pieces so that a lot of them can be easily dosed. People lead by example and should act fun and relaxed when turning scary situations into tasty and fun exercises.

Use 10-20 or more candies in each session and make sure you use the highest value candies you can find. One simple trick is to keep 3 different treats in your training bag at all times so you can grab the goodies quickly if your dog seems worried, anxious or scared.

It is important to mention that this is the perfect time to give treats to make your dog feel more confident.

To ensure trust, the best timing of treats is to make sure they come just before or when the dog is nervous. Even a delay of 1-2 seconds can disrupt training.

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Note: If your dog does not eat the treat during the session, remember that he may be too far out of his comfort zone and you should take him away and try a longer distance later. We’ve found that healthy meat treats like cooked chicken, cooked hamburger meat, even cold cuts and hot dogs (cut into small pieces for exercise) can really help.

When a dog starts to growl, bark, snap, or jump, people want to stop the unwanted behavior as quickly as possible and often “correct” their dog by raising their voice, scolding the dog, or making strict eye contact. Unfortunately, if the dog is reactive out of fear, this is exactly the wrong approach!

If you really want to address your dog’s reactive and aggressive behavior due to fear and phobias, DO NOT act angry, scold, or “stare” at your dog!

Trying to stop or punish growling by “pulling on the leash” or using corrections can damage the recovery process and prevent your dog from wanting to communicate with you.

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Dogs, especially anxious dogs, need to feel safe, comfortable and confident. Dogs that growl, bark, lunge and bite rush out because they