When you get a new puppy, you’ll need to consider your options for behavior training.
Training a new puppy is a significant investment of time – and potentially, money. When you’re exploring the different training methods available to you, there are some essential things to keep in mind.
Training at Home
If you’re willing to take the time, there are many ways to train your dog at home – and many benefits to doing so.
Schedule Flexibility:The most significant advantage of choosing to train your puppy may be flexibility. By forgoing formal training classes, you aren’t worrying about scheduling, driving back and forth, and juggling the unexpected conflicts that may come up.
Familiar Environment:Training at home helps your dog to learn necessary behaviors in their most comfortable environment, so there is reinforcement right away.
Prioritize Specific Behaviors:When training your puppy yourself, you have the luxury of working within your time frames and at a consistent pace. If there are specific behaviors that are needing more time for your puppy to grasp, you can make those adjustments and concentrate on his problem areas.
Personalized Attention:Your pup is also getting focused attention from you when you train at home, which may help with dogs that are easily distracted.
Still, training at home requires a lot of personal time and commitment to ensure proper and lasting results.
Training in a Formal Obedience Class
Let’s face it; many of us don’t have the time and/or knowledge to successfully train our dogs. But that fact shouldn’t concern you. There are local Sarasota and Bradenton area trainers and classes designed to help you and your dog succeed.
- Training classes help pet owners to achieve the behaviors necessary for a puppy to be happy and healthy. In these classes, puppies are exposed to a variety of situations, and trainers work with them to obtain the desired behavior or outcome.
- Researchers and trainers recommend puppies meet nearly 100 people in their first month with you at home. That can be a daunting task if you’re balancing work and other family priorities. But training classes expose your puppy to lots of other animals, people and a variety of settings, which all help in not only their behavior training but their socialization as well. Once they complete training, distractions are less likely to impact their behavior.
- Puppies that attend training classes are taught using positive reinforcement, which helps them develop a vital personality trait – wanting to please their owners. It also helps instill a level of confidence, which offsets anxiety and fear as they grow older.
- Professional trainers have encountered many different puppy personalities. Based on their experiences, they have developed options and methods that can help achieve the outcomes you are hoping for with them.
In all likelihood, you’ll want to explore a combination of both training your puppy at home and attending classes. Paying attention to how the trainers work with your puppy and mimicking those methods at home will reinforce training with your puppy so that they will learn things faster. Talk with your trainer about behaviors and situations at home that they can work on in training classes.
Proper training is one of the most important investments you can make when you bring a new puppy home. We are here to help ensure that your new addition becomes a well-socialized, well-behaved member of your family. Give Gulf Coast K9 Dog Training a call today to learn more about our puppy training options. We have worked with hundreds of Sarasota and Lakewood Ranch area dogs and dog owners over the years. We can help you, too.
