Hi my name is Beth and I'm a canine behaviour and training advisor here at Battersea
Today we're going to talk about the basic principles of training your dog
Dogs learn by making associations so if a dog performs a behaviour and then something good happens afterwards he's much more likely to repeat it
This means that repetition is really important for your dog to learn so when we're training we repeat things multiple times so that our dog is more likely to pick things up
When we ignore dogs and their unwanted behaviour they quickly offer alternative behaviours because they want to please us so when the dog offers the behaviour that you want them to do you have to quickly reward it as soon as you can
Clicker training can be really useful to improve your timing
The noise that our clicker makes like this can pinpoint the moment that the dog performs the behaviour you want overall
We want our training to be fun with our dogs so all the training methods you see us using in these videos will be positive and reward based methods
Using positive training methods will also help build a great relationship with your dog so it's important to find out what your dog's motivated by: food, toys or praise so I'm going to see which one I like the most here
I've got food in my hand and the toy in the other hand and she's gone straight for the food
Good girl! Well done!
So now I'm going to play with the toy and see if I can get a bit more interest out of her in it but now she's just interested in me
Toys can be really useful for behaviours where you want your dog to have a bit more excitement, so for instance if you're teaching your dog a recall, it can help to drive their motivation up and get them running back to you faster in situations where you don't have food or toys to hand
Praise and attention can be a great way to reward your dog, you can use your energy levels to get your dog more excited or to calm your dog down depending on the situation
When teaching a new behaviour it's important to reward your dog consistently so every time your dog performs the behaviour, he gets the reward
So I'm going to start doing a sit with “Willow, sit! Good girl” and reward her consistently every time she does it
Once your dog is performing the behaviour consistently you can start to randomly reward the dog say three of the five times
They'll get the reward and this will maintain motivation in your dog “Sit! Good girl” so she's not going to get biscuits every time
When your dog performs your behaviour really well or he's done it in a particularly difficult situation you can use a jackpot reward to make sure that he knows how well he's done
That was the basics of training if you'd like to know more on how to train your dog The Battersea Way visit our website and keep watching our videos
