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Soft Dog Harness

January 16th, 2010 admin No comments

Soft Dog Harness

Train Your Puggle To Be The Best Behaved Dog

When you bring your Puggle home, you'll want to immediately start the training process. Training a dog is good not only for your relationship with the dog, but for the dog's emotional health. Dogs travel in packs, naturally, and follow the lead of an alpha dog. When you train your dog, you become the alpha in his life, and he willingly does what you want. If your dog does not have an alpha, he will either become the alpha himself, doing whatever he wants and making everyone miserable, or will become depressed and listless.

Training should begin the moment you arrive home, by putting your Puggle on a leash, taking him out to the back yard and allowing him to choose a bathroom spot. This will help him learn where he's supposed to go, and establish his territory.

Crate training is a recommended potty training method. Using a small crate (with enough room to turn around and lie down comfortably), keep your Puggle in his crate when you're not able to be with him. Take him out and immediately take him outside to use the bathroom. You can set his food and water inside the crate when you'll be out of the house.

Setting up a routine is very important in training your Puggle pup. Dogs, and especially puppies, need very regular schedules for things like going outside to the bathroom, eating, and sleeping. Of course the bathroom trips should be based around your dog's needs, but the more routines you set up, the happier your pup will be.

When you're ready to leash train your puppy, start by training him to wear a soft body harness. This may feel strange at him to first, so you will want to start by just training him to feel comfortable in the harness, and gradually introduce walking on the leash. If your pup doesn't quite get walking on a leash, be patient and show him what you want him to do. Some pups will just lie down and let their owners pull them along; make sure you stand your pup up and gently show him how to walk on the leash.

One thing to be aware of when training your puppy is that dogs learn to do what gets them the results they want. In other words, if you respond to your pup's whining by picking him up, he'll learn that to get picked up, he needs to whine. The key to training the behavior you want is to only reward good behavior, and ignore bad behavior.

While it may be tempting to punish your pup, most punishment doesn't work because the dog doesn't know what he did. An exception to this would be when your dog nips or bites you; saying "NO!" and refusing to play will get the message across that such behavior is not acceptable.

As you are training your dog, spend a lot of time on socialization, allowing your dog to get used to people and animals in various situations, so that your pup will have a calm demeanor when facing other dogs or humans.

The most important thing to remember about training your Puggle is to treat him with all the love and gentleness you have, in order to help him become a well-trained, well-adjusted adult dog.

About the Author

Christy Taylor, author, is a puggles lover as well as a breeder. You can find a lot about puggles at her website, http://www.pugglehugs.com