Dog Obedience Training: Why So Important

Your pet dog is no less than your own child at home; you love and care for it just as much. Shouldn’t it be trained the same way you teach your baby – all the basic manners and etiquettes of daily life? From eating right and potty training to obeying basic instructions, the rules pretty much apply the same to both a child and a domestic pet. There is one key difference though.

Your pet is still an animal, how much ever cute and cuddly it may feel to touch. Unlike your child who may be naughty but wouldn’t cross the limit, your pet dog might just bite an animal, human or even its own owner upon turning aggressive. This is why it’s extremely important to teach your pet obedience more than anything else. And the training must start right from day 1 of it becoming a part of your life.

How Dog Obedience Training Pays Off

There are several advantages of doing so, some of which include

1. Your pet learns to follow all commands

This is the prime objective as well as the gain from the obedience training for your dog. You want your pet to follow all instructions and commands that you give it – from sitting or standing to playing and not barking on strangers. Everybody loves a well-trained dog, after all. Obedience training can help your dog get to a stage where it politely obeys whatever you say and you too get comfortable taking it out in public places.

2. Ensure safety of your pet

Even though dogs are gifted with a unique sense which lets them know when there’s danger around, they may not always be able to respond well in those situations. For instance, if your pet happens to be on a busy road, it wouldn’t know when to wait for traffic to pass; for all you know, it might just run right across it. In such cases, your pet must know the meaning and consequential response of commands like ‘stays’ or ‘come’. Obedience training helps there.

3. Lays foundation for lifelong behaviour

If your dog learns to respond to commands, it’s become well-trained. This means that it’s learnt that you are the authoritative power in charge and it needs to follow all you say. But how about when you aren’t around (which may not always be possible)? You don’t just need your pet to be well-trained; you want it to be well-behaved, eventually, just like your own child.

This means that it needn’t wait for instructions from you to react in any particular situation. Regardless of whether you’re present or not, it should know how to deal with strangers (barring a few ‘danger signals’, of course) or to respond to commands from other family members, perhaps. Dog obedience training helps lay a strong foundation which would help define the behaviour of your dog for a lifetime.

Summary

From being well-trained (which any pet owner can achieve) to becoming well-behaved, dog obedience training helps fill the gap.