These 4 psychological traits of dogs will help you whilst training them

train dog puppy - These 4 psychological traits of dogs will help you whilst training them

As professional dog sitters, we have to often stoop down to the intellectual level of our canine friends. We have to exhibit empathy, which is when you shift your perspective to that of your audience and learn to feel what they feel. Pet care is not simply about making them respond to your orders.

Dogs often respond to our emotional state. Psychologists who have studied the species say that dogs get excited, nervous or agitated depending on the emotional state that humans exhibit. And the famed canine loyalty that we talk about only gets enforced if we behave accordingly. Loyalty cannot be enforced by fear, by through love and positive discipline.

Let us do a quick tutorial wherein we analyze the complexity, or lack thereof, behind canine psychology. If you make a small effort, you can easily deduce what your dog is feeling at any point of time.

facetoface - These 4 psychological traits of dogs will help you whilst training them

Inability to process complex emotions

Humans go through multiple states of emotions. We experience joy, anguish, anger, pride, jealousy, delirium and so on. Some of the emotions, such as pride and guilt, are considered complex emotions. Dogs don’t process complex emotions. This means that if your dog puts up a “sad face” after it has seemingly broken a house rule, it is not eh feeling of guilt that is being displayed, rather a nervoud reaction towards you expression.

Learning by observing

Dogs are masters at learning through observing. If you have an older, well-trained dog in your household and you buy or adopt an infant pup, the pup would automatically observe the veteran in the household and learn. This makes your house training much more straightforward and rapid.

Does tough love work?

Tough love is something that we often employ in circumstances to get desirable results. With dogs, humans often have the desire to be considered the definitive alphas. Hence the approach of tough love. There is a type of training termed as dominance training, often employed to accelerate house training. It might be difficult to digest this, but such short cuts rarely work.

traindog - These 4 psychological traits of dogs will help you whilst training them

Time to learn

It is vital to understand that dogs need time to learn. As intellectually superior beings with the power of discrimination, even humans have a longer learning curve when it comes to assimilating information. It is expected in that case that dogs don’t just get automatically trained. The vitality of patience can never be underestimated.

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