Subscribe Feed (RSS)Are You Following These Three Rules While Training Your Pit Bull
March 26th, 2006 by admin | Filed under Uncategorized.If you think training your Pit Bull to behave is going to be hard think again. Many owners think training their Pit Bull requires some special method or some “secret” method to achieve results. The reality is, training requires neither.
Proper training follows three very specific rules. Let’s dive right in and unwrap them…
Rule 1: Consistency.
Pit Bulls are dogs and dogs learn through successful repetitions. Succesful repetitions of any behavior will result in the dog offering the behavior more often with greater reliability.
Consistency is critical to teaching a specific behavior.
Fact: It takes 40-50 successful repetitions for a dog (your Pit Bull) to learn a specific behavior.
What this means is you can not spend 5 minutes teaching your dog to sit and expect them to sit when you ask all the time.
You have to be consistent and incorporate the sit into everyday life to teach the behavior so it is reliable.
Rule 2: Timing.
One of the mistakes I see Pit Bull owners make while training is bad timing.
Fact: You have 1.5 to 2 seconds to reward your dog.
Beyond 2 seconds your dog does not associate the praise with their behavior.
If you fail to associate the reward with the act within that time frame you might as well forget it. Your dog will not understand what is going on.
In order to make your training stick you should work on your timing and pair the reward with the behavior the instant your dog succeeds.
For example, if you ask your dog to sit and they sit you should reward them the moment their hind end hits the ground.
Let’s move on to the next rule…
Rule 3: Motivation.
I have a quick question for you…
Would you continue to work for the company you work for if they cut your pay by 50% and expected you to produce the same results you are producing right now?
Your answer is probably no. Correct?
Another quick question…
Would you expect your dog to offer you immediate behaviors for no pay or for 50% less of the reward?
There in lies the problem owners make while training their dogs.
They expect the dog to obey them without question in exchange for nothing. This is unfair, unrealistic, and in my opinion the owner has a power trip thing going on.
Dogs work for rewards. The better the reward the greater the motivation they will have to earn said reward.
The pay check should always be high enough to motivate the dog to work.
I’ll use my own Pit Bull Angel as an example. Her all time favorite thing in the entire world is a ball.
when I work with her I carry a ball with me and she is 100% focused on me 100% of the time and will do everything she has been taught to earn the ball. She is highly motivated by the ball.
I use the ball to polish learned behaviors because she is highly motivated for it. She will literally do anything I ask to earn the ball.
Would she work for Tuna? No.
The moral of the story here is you need to raise the pay to increase your dogs motivation to earn the pay.
Some dogs love balls, others love tug toys, still others will work all day for hot dogs. It’s part of your job as their trainer/owner to find out what they love and use that to help train them.
When you have all three rules in place you will find your training efforts are more effective and your Pit Bulls desire to work will increase as well.
For more information on PitBullUniversity.com pit bull training try visiting PitBullUnversity.com PitBullUniversity.com where you will find helpful tips on training your Pit Bull, solving behavior problems, and raising a happy healthy Pit Bull Terrier.
Tags: bull terrier, pit bullRelated posts
Tags: bull terrier, pit bull
