Obedience Training Overview
If your dog's behavior problems occur while a person is present, and you don't think they're due to anxiety or fear, then the fix is simply a matter of basic obedience. In each instance, instruct your dog to perform a specific desirable behavior that is mutually exclusive to the problematic behavior.
Teach your dog to perform each desirable behavior, or skill, on cue, then motivate your dog so that they respond reliably, immediately and happily. Then, test these skills in the face of increasingly more challenging distractions and situations.
It only takes a handful of skills to resolve the vast majority of common dog behavior problems. In fact, you can resolve most problems simply by teaching your dog to sit-stay reliably on cue.
Think about the many behavior problems that dogs can't perform while sitting. They can't jump up, run away, chase squirrels, play too rough, or act like loons. They can't pull on-leash, counter-surf, dig, or hump. The list is endless! If your dog indulges in any of these behaviors when you don't want them to, simply say, “Sit”!
This will be especially helpful if your dog sits promptly, reliably, after a single spoken command, and then remains seated until released, or given another command. Also, you’ll have to practice a LOT if you want them to respond in all locations and situations, even those which are very distracting or otherwise challenging, and without the need for food or other training aids.
But, if your dog sits promptly, reliably and on cue, in every situation, then that's it, problem solved.
Sit-Stay is so useful and easy to teach that we strongly recommend you start by teaching your dog a super-reliable Sit-Stay, or what we like to call a Super Sit. Once your dog has mastered that, it's well worth adding all sorts of other skills to their repertoire, and spending the time to proof some of them so that they are also very reliable. Once you've gone through the process with sit-stay, it's a simple matter of adapting the same techniques to these other behaviors, such as Off, Find Your Chewtoy, Go to Your Bed, Come and Shush.
In order to teach your dog to respond reliably on cue, there are two main methods we recommend: lure-reward training for speedy and effective instruction and wait & reward training for dogs that are inattentive, or hyperactive.
When it comes to motivating your dog to want to perform behaviors on cue, you'll need to be smart about how and when you reward your dog. Initially, use food as a lure to quickly teach your dog what to do but then phase it out and use it only sparingly as rewards to motivate your dog to want to comply. Phase-out food rewards and instead, make full use of life rewards. Integrate numerous, very short training sessions into every part of your dog's day, especially the ones your dog enjoys most.
To proof your dog's reliability, practice each skill in a variety of locations and settings and around a variety of distractions so that your dog gets experience in the sort of situations where you are most likely to lose control of them.
First, we'll explain in detail how to complete all these steps for the Sit-Stay skill, and then we'll briefly explain how you can do the same thing for some other very useful skills.