Does this sound like your dog? If you have a dog you have a barker. Dogs bark, it’s a natural behavior and to expect your dog not to bark is unrealistic. Dogs will bark for a number of reasons. I will talk about a few of the most common.

Demand barking or “Watch what I can make my human do!” barking. This happens when the dog has learned barking makes things happen. The dog barks the doors open, ball gets thrown, food gets put in bowl etc. Congratulations, your dog has very well trained human, he should be very proud. To help stop this you need to break the cycle, stop giving in when he barks. You need to wait for quite then respond.

So, you have decided you need to hire a trainer to help get fido under control. Great! You have made an excellent decision! The trainer will either come to your home or you might travel to their facility. Once a week for about an hour at a time you, your dog and trainer will work together on behaviors. These sessions are the only times during the week you need to practice with your dog right? Wrong! You and fido need to spend time each day working on the exercises your trainer showed you. You must practice these new behaviors or you will not see the results you expect.

How much time should you devote to practice? Well, a simple answer might be as much time as you can fit in to your schedule. The problems come when life gets in the way.  You think “I can do it later”, but later never comes. I ask my clients to try and practice at least 30 minutes everyday. I feel most anyone can find 30 minutes sometime during the day to work with their dog. You do not have to do it all at once and I don’t recommend you try. I suggest you break the 30 minutes up in to small time blocks, say (6) 5 minute sessions or (3) 10 minute sessions. Heck train during the commercials of your favorite weeknight shows. The important thing is making time to train.

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This is a place where we can share our thought on dogs, training and all things dog related. We will be posting on a regular basis, as much as our schedule will allow. Please feel free to share your thoughts on any post, we just ask you to rember this is a family friendly site.  We plan for this to be fun, informative and great place to share thoughts and ideas on dogs and related topics.