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Training Dogs Successfully Calls For Reducing Dog Anxiety

27 13:22:38
The most important obstacle to a really wonderful relationship between you and your dog is your dog's anxiety. Anxiety, you say? Yes! All dogs have great anxiety, largely unseen to humans, which together with their instincts drives their "bad behavior." You may see your dog as "high-energy," or maybe "stubborn," or perhaps "timid," or even "sullen" and "aggressive." And you associate lots of inappropriate, troubling, annoying, or even threatening behavior with those qualities. Those qualities are primarily the symptoms of your dog's anxiety.

As it grows, unhindered, dog anxiety quite quickly becomes fear. With more growth, it can become total terror. When a dog is struggling with reactions and agitations that come from his anxiety, it is very difficult or even impossible for him to express self-governance, the mental control over his body that humans would like to see expressed.

For example, a dog may erupt in frantic barking at the sight of another person, an animal, or even a paper bag. This may be his knee-jerk response to what he feels is a threat to his survival and well-being. After all, how is he to know? This is a human world he lives in, not a dog world. He doesn't know much at all about a human world.

Dogs' instincts are the only information they are born with, and of course they don't question the correctness of that information. But it's faulty, pretty much across the board, for functioning in a human world. As a result, dogs exhibit wrong or "problem" behavior. Humans think they must scold and punish dogs to change their behavior.

If you were doing the only thing you knew to do, a thing you thought was the right thing to do, how would it make you feel to be punished for doing it? Think it might increase your anxiety? Definitely! Dogs are pretty much on a downward mental spiral from the time they are weaned. They must live by trial and error with only the information from their faulty instincts to guide them. To act on impulse is to act on information from instincts. This behavior more often than not meets with scolding and punishment from those in this world they desire most to please. Thus anxiety is nurtured to controlling proportions.

If scolding and punishment are not appropriate and effective means for improving dog behavior, what's the solution? The solution is for you to establish effective communication with your dog through body language and spoken words so that you can give him or her correct information for how to live in this world. You concurrently communicate confidence-building (and therefore anxiety squelching) praise and assurance to your dog through this communication.

Through this communication, a dog learns to ask for permission for everything. A misguided sense of love for his dog and a similarly misguided appreciation for his dog's inborn capabilities might make a guardian reluctant to impose restraints on the dog's instinctive behavior, even though such behavior jeopardizes the dog's safety. All owners must come to the realization that there is no situation in our present urbanized human society in which the dog can safely be left to respond to his instincts. Dogs are happy, relieved in fact, to trade their independent decision-making for the secure and supportive guidance from their owners.

You, a dog owner/guardian, were not born knowing all about dog training. No one was. That doesn't mean you're deficient! No one should expect you to know all about dog training. But because you have a dog companion, please give some serious thought to what I've said about dog anxiety. These ideas are asking you to see beyond the common appearances of "bad" dog behavior and failed dog obedience and come to understand what is really going on for these wonderful animals. Thousands of dogs are being destroyed every day because of their "bad behavior." Dog anxiety is the culprit. We need to obligate ourselves to destroy the anxiety and not the dog!