Articles about American Pit Bull Terrier
Another aspect of the "how" is the intensity of the correction. This is also huge in dog training because too harsh of a correction can break a dog and turn him into avoidance. This would be a major set back for you, your dog and the training especially if your going for a trial and have set your goals to compete at a certain time frame. The other aspect of intensity would be the "under-correction" where the dog gets a correction and it doesn't phase him at all to comply. Yet we see it all the time, don't we? Why's that? It's mainly because most people don't know just how harmful it is to training especially for the competition dogs. When you give a little pulls on the leash or small "pops" or jerks on the collar where the dog doesn't really react to it, you are, in human terms, nagging. Numerous people have been seen always popping the dog into the position they want. And the usual result is the dog not doing it when off lead. There is a reason for this. In the dog world there is no such thing as nagging. In their social life dogs interact in a pretty "black & white" way. Anyone who steps out of line is "corrected" in a very decisively way. So when you start nagging a dog into obedience what you're actually doing is teaching your dog to disobey you. When you do that you're accustoming your dog to YOU doing the training instead of him. Which puts in his mindset the attitude of "why do it if he's going to? let him do it!" So bear in mind that dogs are very smart creatures and can easily be misguided by improper training. So it's up to us to keep our abilities sharp to make sure we're not taking our dogs to doom, but making them clearly understand the skills we are trying to teach them. We owe it to them. Happy training!
