5 essential skills your dog should learn

By Jordan Walker

There are a few skills that your dog must learn so that it can enjoy and feel comfortable in the human world. These skills should be taught preferably when it’s still a puppy. Responsible pet owners should start dog training the moment the pet is brought home.

For basic puppy training, there are only a few training essentials needed. But when teaching your pup obedience and proper behavior, you probably need to prepare some dog treats and a leash. However, even if you have these things in handy, you need to make sure you also have willingness and patience when training your puppy because your presence, hand gestures, facial expression, and voice commands play an important role.

Once you think you have all the essentials required, you can now teach your pooches these tricks:

Responding to its name
Training your furry friend to respond whenever you call his name could be quite simple. But it could take some time because your puppy needs to get used to the name you’ve chosen. Make sure to select a clear name, ideally, those names with two syllables.

To begin, call him by his name a few times, pause, and wait until you get his attention. By the time he gets used to this, you can go on with other skills included in the puppy training.

“Yes”, “No”, and “Come Here” commands
These commands are very important and should be learned by the puppy at a young age so that you can start instilling good behavior before the challenging times in their development happens.

The “yes”, “no”, and “come here” commands can be accompanied by a hand gesture. The “Yes” command is for encouraging good behavior, “No” is for stopping incorrect or inappropriate behavior, while “Come here” is used to encourage your puppy to move directly to where you are.

Walking on a loose leash
Your puppy needs to get used to having a collar and a leash since this is helpful during exercise. This could even be very useful during training. With the use of a leash, you can train your puppy to follow your lead and eventually control their inborn migratory instinct.

Socialization
Just like man, your furry pal needs to socialize. Regardless of how comfortable those lounge dog steps are at home, he also needs to go out and enjoy the outdoor environment.

While he is still a puppy, take time to expose him to the presence of other people (adults and kids), as well as other dogs (different breeds and sizes). They need to get accustomed to the presence of people and other dogs, so that they’d know how to behave properly, play safely, or enjoy the company of others.

Outdoor bathroom training

Some dogs are naturally able to defecate and urinate outside the home. But it isn’t the same for all of them. For outdoor bathroom training, you can make use of puppy pads. When you routinely transfer these puppy pads outdoors, they’ll eventually get the idea of doing their business outdoors.

The time frame for your pet’s ability to master these skills may vary. Nevertheless, you must always remember to shower your pet with words of praise and a treat for achieving a skill. This way, he’ll associate good behavior with praise and affection from his master. Your patience and persistence throughout the training is very important to yield remarkable results.

Jordan Walker likes to write many pet-related blogs and is also the lead content curator for Coops and Cages. His passion for animals is only matched by his love for ‘attempting’ to play the guitar. Catch him on Google+ or Twitter: @CoopsAndCages.