Find A Great Trainer & Exercising Your Dog

All of us want to have great relationships with our canine companions.  Whether our fantasy is to have a four-legged couch potato sit next to us while we watch television, to ace an agility course with a canine teammate or to fetch the morning paper, our common ideal is to share our lives with well-behaved dogs.
Often though, real life gets in the way of the ideal.  Our would-be TV companion may be more interested in chewing up the couch than sitting on it.  Our prospective agility champion may choose to practice its moves by standing upright and scoring unauthorized goodies from the kitchen counter.  And the pooch we wish would bring us the day’s newspaper may decide instead to retrieve socks, shoes and other forbidden objects. 
Although people can and do solve these and other problems, they often need some help.  They need the experience, counsel and guidance of a person who’s learned how to teach dogs to be well-mannered members of human households.  Fortunately, many dog trainers are available. 

WHAT A TRAINER CAN DO
A good trainer helps eliminate a dog’s bad behavior in three ways:

1. A trainer can analyze the problem.  Before you can solve your dog’s problem, you need to know exactly what the problem is – and a trainer can help you do that.  A good trainer will take a full history to make sure that the dog’s issue/issues are properly understood.  In other words, a trainer will ask you questions designed to help him or her understand exactly what your dog is doing and why. 
2. A trainer can teach the basics.  A good trainer can show you how to teach your dog basic commands, such as come, sit, down and stay, which enable you to gain control over your dog and begin to establish a healthy relationship.  Understanding the basic commands allows you to communicate better with your dog.  A dog that doesn’t understand the basics has little if any means of positive communication with its owner.  How can the more complex behavioral challenges be addressed if the dog doesn’t even know how to sit on cue?
3. A trainer can create custom solutions.  Canine behavioral problems don’t always lend themselves to a one-size fits-all approach.  By analyzing your dog’s behavior and working with both you and your dog, a good trainer can devise solutions tailored to your dog’s unique problems, environment and personality.  These solutions can be called management plans which is a plan for meeting the dog’s real needs – a healthy diet, chewing and digging outlets, adequate exercise, and companionship and mental stimulation.  Such plans don’t replace training, but they do enhance its effectiveness. 

KNOW YOUR OPTIONS
There’s more than one way a trainer can instruct you and your dog.  Such schooling may take one or more of the following forms:
            Obedience Classes: Traditional obedience classes in which you and your dog are one of several dog-and-owner pairs being taught by one instructor are the most-common and least-expensive form of dog-and-owner instruction. 
            Private lessons: Private lessons in which the trainer comes to your home to instruct you and your dog can be an effective way to address a dog’s behavior issues.

For more information on these services or if you have any questions, please feel free to give me a call at 626-290-4370.