Pet Training Troubles With Multiple Pets

Training your pet is by far one of the best things you can do to keep your pets happy, healthy, and out of trouble. Training takes consistent amounts of time, effort and patience on your part. Because of these requirements, one of the most frustrating issues for many people, is how to train multiple pets in the same household.

When you have more then one pet in your house, especially dogs, they often have a desire to play with each other. This is quite naturally common in dogs as they like to play for several reasons, including establishing dominance. This will cause problems for the beginning trainer or the earlier stages of the dogs training, such as a puppy. Let's take a look at some things you can do to ease the stress of training when you have more then one pet.

The one aspect of pet training that is the same, is that pets will do the behavior they find the most rewarding. And they find playtime to be very rewarding. The trick here is not to eliminate playtime, but to establish playtime and training time as separate and distinct experiences for your dog.

In the beginning it will be necessary to separate the dogs during their training sessions. This is not a matter of simply placing one in the other room. You need to work with only one dog at a time. This gives the one dog your undivided attention. If you have to stop training to corral or control the other dog you will lose much of the benefit of that training session.

When you separate your pets, they most likely will whine a bit at first. It may be a good idea to take your pet for a walk to another field for that training session. Try to go at least far enough away to not here the other pets, as the whining will be a distraction for both you and your pet. You will not want to hear it, and the other pet will want to investigate. This also will cause a loss of benefit.

If you cannot go away from the house, then try to enlist a friend or family member to play or watch the other pet. This comforts the other pet and will decrease the chance of whining, and actually has the benefit of distracting the pet so they do not consider the missing co-pet as a bad thing.

As your pets get to more advanced training techniques, where distractions a re actually needed, then you can bring them both with you. Have one sit, practice their staying power, and train them one after the other.

Once you get them accustomed to some alone time with the trainer, you should see a remarkable increase in their training success. The one on one time will always progress better then trying to control a mob of pets.