Pet Training Mishaps and Tips

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(Newswire.net — November 3, 2020) — I have been working as an animal behaviorist for the past five years and have come across many stories of pet training mishaps in my daily life.

I’ve seen that a responsible pet owner will never want their dog or cat to suffer from any mishap. A misbehaving pet can cause a lot of trouble for his handler. Facing these issues, pet guardians often contact me for the best tips and tricks.

I am never in favor of punishing a dog for mishaps; instead, I primarily use reward-based positive reinforcement methods to correct their behaviors. Here I will share some of the training mishaps stories and tips we use to correct their behaviors.

Roco the four-year-old Pitbull 

Training Mishap

Roco is a powerful pit bull, but he has poor recall skills every time his owner takes him to the park and off-leash him, he always physically abuses male dogs. 

This incident occurs more frequently, although it did not result in any physical harm, Roco’s owner did not want anyone to judge his dog harshly.

Solution 

When this dog came to me, I spent a lot of time with him and developed a plan for him that includes the use of food as a reward. I have noticed that Roco shows a change in behavior as he starts bending down and immediately stiffening.

He begins to display this behavior from a great distance after seeing a dog with which he is not comfortable. During his behavior training, when we see that type of body language, we immediately call him and reward him with a treat. After implementing this tip, we have zero incidents in the past few months.

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Scobby the Golden Retriever 

Training mishap

Scobby, the Golden Retriever, is an attention-seeking dog. He always knows the trick to get everyone’s attention. The mishaps that happen to Scobby are that he barks excessively, grabs unnecessary things, and plays with unusual things.

One of the worst things Scobby does is jump on the food table to get the food left by family members. Scobby generally responds well when called upon and shows great enthusiasm when seeing his family members.

But Scobby didn’t like someone to touch him unnecessarily. Every time someone tried to touch his collar or try to leave him inside a crate for more than a few hours, he barked excessively and scratched at the door.

Solution

Scobby is a calmer dog now thanks to positive reinforcement techniques that encourage him to adopt good behaviors.

After a few weeks of training, he learned that jumping to the food table is not good; he now demands less and rarely barks. Scooby now loves to play with his family members and respond well when someone calls him, and he lets them take him by his collar.

Conclusion 

After working so many years as an animal behaviorist, I came to the conclusion that pets are not rude or aggressive by birth; our training setbacks are the one that induces such behaviors in them. We can completely change the behavior of our pets by using positive reinforcement and the treat base method.