Does dog understand no?

Dog Training Basics : How to Get Your Dog to Behave

Dog training is an essential part of raising a puppy, or even a grown dog. Training can help make you and your pet’s lives easier and more fun.

Dog training is an important aspect of dog ownership, and can seem daunting. It’s true, there’s a lot dogs need to learn, but with the proper mindset and execution, you can have your dog following your orders in no time. Training can help with behavior problems, obedience, and companionship. Before you start, though, you need to train yourself, and learn the basics. Here’s how to do just that:

Prepare Yourself: Dog training is as much about your mindset as your dog’s. Before you begin training sessions, make sure you are mentally prepared. Training requires patience and understanding. If you get frustrated teaching your dog something, you can bet your dog is frustrated as well.
Be Consistent: Another important thing to know about training your dog is to be consistent. If you are training your dog and using different commands each time you do it, your dog will never be able to learn. Make sure you and your family know what words you are using with which commands, and be consistent in these. Additionally, you should keep rewards and treats consistent.
Positive Reinforcement: While some people might tell you a strict demeanor is the key to training, this is not always true. When beginning to train your dog, it’s essential to maintain an air of positivity. When your dog successfully sits or comes to you, a reward will reinforce this behavior. Giving your dog rewards, whether they are actual snacks or just praise and petting, is the only way to get your pet to learn the dog training basics. Giving rewards, though, obviously doesn’t work when discouraging bad behavior. To do this, simply make sure your dog does not get rewarded for behavior problems. Ignoring them or simply saying, “No” usually works well.
Keep it Simple: Dogs don’t just learn how to do elaborate activities right away when training. They need to learn the parts of each exercise, so you need to start your pet off with dog training basics. Start off with the simplest tasks, such as sitting or staying, before graduating to more complicated commands. When teaching something difficult, break it down and teach it step by step. This will make it easier for your dog to understand.
Good Scheduling: If you are doing a dog training basics session, teaching him simple commands like sitting and coming, make sure you do these on an appropriate schedule. To reinforce the activities, make sure you do training every day. Try to keep every session short, so your dog doesn’t get frustrated or bored, and always end positively.

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How to Teach Your Dog To Do Anything in 4 Easy Steps

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Do you want to teach your dog a neat new trick? Are you just getting started with puppy training and want to teach your dog the basics?

I’m going to let you in on a dog trainer secret — when teaching dogs a new skill, no matter how simple or complex the behavior we want to train, we follow the same process every time. And once you learn this process, you can teach your dog anything!

One of my goals as a dog trainer is to equip my human students with the tools to understand how dogs learn and the training mechanics for them to easily and effectively put into practice on their own. This means they’ll have the means to train their dog for life, not only building a robust human-canine relationship but also helping to prevent problem behaviors. This empowers them to pursue lots of different activities with their dogs, from competition obedience to other dog sports like Canicross, Flyball, or Agility.

Let’s look at the process of how to teach your dog to do anything. Once you know these 4 steps, all you need is some creative thinking, problem-solving skills, and practice!

Step One: Decide What You Want to Train

This first step is pretty essential. If you don’t know what you want, it’s going to be really hard for your dog to figure it out! When deciding what you’re going to teach your dog, you need to frame it a certain way — don’t think about what you want your dog to stop doing.

We humans often fall into the trap of saying, “I want my dog to not jump on people,” or “My dog needs to stop pulling on the leash.” You cannot train the absence of something. You must give your dog clear criteria for a behavior that is incompatible with any unwanted behavior.

Trainer Note: The four steps outlined in this article are meant to show the process of teaching a dog a new obedience behavior based on specific positions or movements.
These are not necessarily the same training plan steps a dog trainer or canine behavior consultant would rely on for behavior modification (such as leash reactivity, fear aggression, resource guarding, or anxiety).

Connect with a certified dog trainer or behavior consultant near you if your dog is struggling with these types of behaviors to begin a personalized behavior modification plan with your dog.

Examples of clearly-defined dog training goals:

I want to teach my dog to sit when greeting people.
I want to teach my dog to spin in a full circle to their right.
I want to teach my dog to walk at my pace within one foot of my left side when on leash.
I want to train my dog to go open the refrigerator, grab me a beer from the lower shelf and bring it to me, making sure to close the fridge door behind him.

These are all actions your dog can take and are well-defined, even though some are more complicated behaviors than others. No matter how complex a new behavior might seem, you’ll approach it the same way as a simple behavior.

The only difference is that you train the full behavior in small slices, chaining the steps together as your dog learns — we’ll get more in-depth on this during the next step.

Step Two: Make the Behavior Happen

Now it’s time to bust out some creative thinking. Some behaviors, such as sit or down, happen more often and more naturally than your dog walking on a loose leash. In order to learn a new behavior, a dog must be reinforced for it. To reinforce the behavior, it’s got to happen first! We have a few different ways to “make” a behavior happen:

Environmental Set-Up

Build an environment where the behavior is easier to perform naturally or with the help of luring or shaping (which are explained below). Having environmental guides to encourage specific movements or positioning stacks the deck in your favor.

Examples of using environmental setups in training:

Guide your dog into position or through the movement of the behavior with a lure. This is most easily done with a food treat, but can also be done with a toy or with nothing in the hand at all once a dog has learned how to follow hand prompts.

A food lure is when you have a treat in a closed hand, and that hand guides the dog into the desired position. A dog is likely to follow a food lure because they can smell the treat, and if you can control where their head goes, you can control how their body moves or is positioned.

When first introducing a new behavior to your dog, sometimes it takes practice to get the lure just right in positioning and speed. For instance, if you’re teaching your dog to sit when they greet someone, you’ll place the lure right in front of their nose and slowly move it over their head (between their ears). The dog should follow the lure with their nose, causing their rear end to hit the floor.

Sometimes, however, we move the treat back too quickly or position too high, and the dog jumps up towards it or moves around to try and find it rather than sitting. It takes practice to find the exact speed and positioning of your lure. If your dog isn’t following a food lure or hand prompt well, try moving slower or keeping your hand closer to their nose as you move it.

Watch this video to see Mary Berry learn the basics of following a lure:

Shape the Behavior

Shaping is a fun and incredibly effective dog training method, fully utilizing the power of marker training (clicker training). If you and your dog are familiar with the clicker, you can teach more complex behaviors with shaping. Shaping means you take a behavior and slice it into smaller, more manageable actions.

For example, if you’re teaching your dog to fetch a drink from the fridge for you, you could train the entire behavior in these seven steps:

Taking a step towards the refrigerator
Grabbing a rope attached to the fridge handle
Pulling on a rope or towel to open the door
Grabbing onto the beverage (gently!)
Pulling the beverage out of the fridge
Closing the fridge
Bringing the drink to you

You can even slice these portions of the entire behavior into smaller pieces. By focusing on easy steps one by one, your dog will be more successful and learn the whole process faster because they understand each action of the sequence.

Shaping can be done in conjunction with a lure, which can be especially helpful if a dog isn’t wanting to follow a lure into a certain position like down.

Trainer Note: Make sure your dog isn’t avoiding certain positions or movements during training due to being in pain or injured. Check out this article on how to tell if your dog might be in pain.

One of my favorite ways to train is called Free Shaping, where the dog is offering behaviors in an effort to get the click without any prompting or lure. I find that this keeps a dog engaged in the training process and really builds their problem-solving skills! Want to see free shaping in action? Check out this video:

Capture the Behavior

Capturing a behavior means that you wait until the action naturally occurs on its own, allowing you to reinforce it. Most recently, I’ve been using the capturing method with my dog to work on her «stretch» trick. I haven’t been able to successfully lure or prompt the positioning of this cue, thanks to her long Corgi body and short legs.

She has a tendency to just lay down with no intermediary bow or stretch position from the stand. Whenever I see her naturally stretching, usually whenever she gets up from her dog bed, I take the opportunity to name it and reward it. Sometimes I give just praise and petting, or more often, I mark with a «yes» or click and then give her a treat. Watch this video to see what capturing looks like:

Step Three: Mark and Reinforce the Behavior

The more a behavior is reinforced (whether with a food reward or something else that the dog finds valuable), the more it will be repeated. It’s up to us to make sure we’re reinforcing the behaviors we want our dogs to learn so they will choose to do them more often and when asked.

This is where your clicker (or marker word such as saying «click» or «yes») is going to do all the heavy lifting for you. When your dog is performing the new behavior, mark it with a click or word, then give them a treat. And repeat!

When Do You Name the Behavior?
Don’t worry about giving the behavior a verbal cue until your dog is reliably performing it. Then, once they understand the action that’s getting the click, start saying the cue (such as «Sit») as they are sitting down. Then click and treat!
Dogs learn by association. With practice, you’ll be able to give them the verbal cue without any luring, and they’ll perform the behavior because they have associated the word with the action.

Your click or «yes!» is telling your dog precisely what action is getting them the treat reward — it’s acting as a bridge, giving you time to reward them with the treat. If you were not using a marker in training, the reinforcement (treat) needs to be given instantaneously with the action you’re wanting to reinforce, which can be hard!

When first training a new behavior, I recommend starting with luring but moving into shaping as quickly as you can. This way you’re utilizing the clicker to its full potential, and your dog is learning important problem-solving skills that will make future training easier! Click here for more information about using a clicker with luring versus shaping methods.

Step Four: Practice and Generalize the Behavior

Once you’ve gotten started with the above steps, then it all comes down to repetition and practice. You’ll want to practice the behavior around low distractions at first before slowly adding in busier, and therefore harder, environments. Walking on a loose leash at home is easier for your dog than walking on a loose leash in the park — there’s all those smells and squirrels to contend with!

Once your pup has got the hang of the skill around no to low distractions, then make it a little bit harder. After walking on a loose leash inside, take it out to your driveway or the sidewalk in front of your home. Then around the block. This is called generalization, where your dog is learning that this new behavior is rewarding no matter where they are! Once a behavior has been generalized, you can then begin to fade out training treats in the environments where your dog is reliably performing the cue.

By following the general steps outlined above, you can teach your dog to do anything you can imagine (within their physical abilities, of course)! Training your dog to do things you like means that you can ask them for alternative and incompatible options to prevent unwanted behaviors, such as sitting in front of guests instead of jumping on them, or walking nicely on lead instead of dragging you down the street. If you need help getting started, connecting with a certified dog trainer can help you and your dog work as a team and will give you the chance to learn training skills that will last a lifetime.

We want to know what cool and unique tricks or behaviors you’ve trained your dog to do — share them with us in the comments below!

About the author

Cathy Madson, MA, FDM, CBCC-KA, CPDT-KA

As Preventive Vet’s dog behavior expert and lead trainer at Pupstanding Academy, Cathy focuses on helping humans and their pets build a strong relationship based on trust, clear communication, and the use of positive reinforcement and force-free methods. With over 13 years of experience, she has had the opportunity to work with hundreds of dogs on a wide variety of training and behavior issues. Beyond her one-on-one consultations through Pupstanding Academy, she also teaches group dog training classes at Seattle Humane. Her specialties include dog aggression, resource guarding, separation anxiety, and puppy socialization.

Cathy is a certified Family Dog Mediator, and certified through the Certification Council of Professional Dog Trainers, holding both the CPDT-KA and CBCC-KA designations. Cathy is a Fear Free Certified Certified Professional, a member of the Association of Professional Dog Trainers, the Pet Professional Guild, and the Dog Writer’s Association of America. She has also completed the Aggression in Dogs Master Course.

When she’s not geeking out about dogs, you can find her reading, hiking with her two Cardigan Welsh Corgis, or paddleboarding.

Does dog understand no?

Dog Training Basics : How to Get Your Dog to Behave

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