How do you teach a puppy to sit when he doesn’t understand English? He has never heard the word sit before and doesn’t know what to do. He just knows you just shouted “sit” five times and getting impatient.
Just like parenting, there are different methods to teach a dog behavior. Some cultures preach love and kindness, some cultures preach strictness and discipline. There is generally a spectrum of trainers:
-
Dominant pack leader(“Alpha roll”)
-
Traditional method (“Uncle with stick”/”Death Stare”)
-
Coercion training (choke chain)
-
E-Collar training (using electric stims)
-
Bonking
-
Balanced dog training
-
Clicker training (adapted from training dolphins)
-
Pure positive training
For us, we fall somewhere between 6 and 7. We teach by mostly positive reinforcement using the markers “Yes” and “Good”, but there will be occasional times that we need to teach “No”. A rule of thumb will be that majority of our communication with our dogs should be Yes’s and hopefully keep No’s to less than 5% of our interactions with our dogs. This keeps our dogs liking interactions with us. The success of this depends on how much effort we put into the training. That is why we are called Say Yes Dog Training.