By Ketan Panchal*
A stubborn dog is a very determined dog focused on what he/she wants and actively disobeys what he/she knows; Instead of following your command, a stubborn dog will want to lead. Dogs can be a bit stubborn for various reasons.
Training A Stubborn Dog
Training a stubborn dog doesn’t have to be complicated or frustrating, but it does take patience and discipline. Below are a few effective ways to train a stubborn dog.
Create A Routine
When training a stubborn dog, it is essential to create a routine for you and your dog to begin creating the proper habits and working on the issues you are experiencing. Always remember training has to be fun for you and your pet.
Stay Consistent
Now that you have created a routine, you must stay consistent. Consistency ultimately leads to reliability and creates the proper habits. If you want your pup to stop being stubborn, ensure that you stay consistent when training your dog to begin seeing reliable, consistent obedience.
Use Rewards To Your Advantage
When training a stubborn dog, always remember to use your dog’s satiating cues as a reward to your advantage.For example, if you have a dog that loves to be outside, use the reward in that very moment (access to outside ) when he obeys your orders.
Stop Repeating Yourself
When training a stubborn dog or any dog for that matter, we never want to get in the habit of repeating our commands.
What happens when you repeat a command to your dog? Your dog learns to ignore the first command, the second, and so on until your pup chooses to listen after x amount of times.
Repeating a command teaches your pup to ignore you at the first time.
Be Patient
When dealing with a stubborn dog, remember to be patient; you’ll get nothing out of getting frustrated, instead stay consistent.
As pet parents, we have to understand that patience is vital whenever we are undoing weeks, months, or even years of bad habits.
Create A Controlled Environment
To begin training a stubborn dog, one of the best things you can do is create a controlled environment for your pup to start teaching your dog how to listen to you in a variety of different scenarios, such as starting in a small quiet room.
Creating a controlled environment also ensures that you are prepared for the distractions because you can add or remove distractions as you please.
Start Slow
Always begin training a stubborn dog slow; never jump into the most challenging task before your dog is ready.
Whenever you begin training your pup, you want to go at the pace that your dog is currently at, not at the pace you want your dog to be.
The objective is to gradually increase the difficulty, not to push your pup too far too soon before when he/she is ready for a given challenge. Keep training sessions very small, like 10 to 15 minutes. I suggest you convert their feeding time into small training sessions.
Training a stubborn dog isn’t complicated. It just takes consistency on your end to begin creating consistent, reliable behaviors from your pup.
If you follow the guidelines above, you will begin to notice that training a stubborn dog is easy!