Training a guard dog can not only help increase your home’s level of security, it can also allow you to have a loyal companion who is devoted to keeping your family safe. However, it’s important that you give your dog proper training in how to efficiently guard your home. After you have mastered the basics of guard dog training, you can move on to some more advanced techniques. It’s essential that you have established your role as your dog’s teacher before attempting advanced training.
Dog Training Tips: # 1 – Identifying Suspicious Behavior
When training a guard dog, it’s essential that you give them the ability to recognize suspicious behavior outside your home. After your dog is socialized, begin by instructing them to alert you to nighttime visitors. In general, any activity outside your home after dark should be reason enough for your dog to alert you. In addition to this, teaching your dog to bark at suspicious activity can help to deter potential burglars.
Dog Training Tips: # 2 – Food Acceptance
When you have a guard dog, there is a danger that a potential burglar will come prepared. A burglar may bring a food or treat item laced with a harmful substance in order to disable your guard dog. Training your dog to avoid this situation is difficult, though can be accomplished by repeating a few simple techniques. Once you have established your role as your dog’s owner, you can begin training them to accept food only from you and members of your family. This can be done by never allowing people outside of your household to feed your dog. In addition to this, you can implement a method in which your dog will only accept food from one person. Keeping your dog well-fed and satisfied is also highly recommended for this advanced training technique.
Dog Training Tips: # 3 – Aggressive Behavior
In general, it is not recommended that you teach your dog to bite intruders. This is a technique that is best left to strict training programs employed by professional dog trainers. However, it is still possible for you to teach your dog to exhibit intimidating or aggressive behavior against intruders. When using this advanced technique, be sure to include a “Stop” command that can be used to instantly call your dog away from an intruder. This can help prevent your dog from intimidating non-threatening visitors to your home, and also gives you a greater degree of control over your dog’s behavior.
Dog Training Tips: # 4 – Clicker Training a Guard Dog
If you want to have full customization over your dog’s behavior, you may want to try a training technique called “clicker training”. Clicker training can be used to implement extremely specific commands in guard dogs, such as the ability to bark twice for an approaching vehicle, while barking once for a visitor at the door. However, there are some dogs who are more suited to complicated commands, such as dogs with a high intelligence level. An intelligent dog will only need a command to be repeated a few times until they associate the command with a specific action. Some dogs, such as bulldogs, are in a lower intelligence category, and may require a command to be repeated from 80 to 100 times [1] before they understand it.
Dog Training References:
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intelligence_of_Dogs
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