Is Advanced Obedience Training Right For Your Dog?
Advanced dog obedience training is an opportunity for a pooch to develop their skills to a higher level. You may be wondering, though, whether your dog is ready for it and whether this sort of training is right for them. This article will explore both of those concerns.
What Is Advanced Dog Obedience Training?
Basic training is intended to handle simple day-to-day issues, such as hearing commands and responding to them without hesitation. This entails making sure the dog can cope with daily distractions, socialize well with other canines, and handle basic commands. There's nothing wrong with stopping at the sit and stay commands, but training can go further.
A big step that makes training advanced is the removal of the leash when a dog is around other pooches, kids, people, and even wild animals. It is a huge leap to go from expecting your dog to sit while on a leash and expecting them to not go sprinting after a chipmunk that crosses their path when they're free to run. Eventually, the goal of this form of dog obedience training is to get to the point that your animal responds to commands at a distance. They should also become familiar with hand signals.
Why Is This Necessary?
From work reasons to basic family life, there are plenty of reasons why advanced training is desirable. Obviously, most work dogs have to be able to operate away from their humans to be effective. Advanced training is often the first step toward more specialized training, such as developing herding, hunting, and tracking skills.
Even if your dog will live in the lap of luxury for the rest of its life, advanced training also promotes safety. By focusing the dog on avoiding distractions, risks of your dog running out into traffic or getting into fights with other animals can be reduced.
Some dogs also benefit from continued training to sustain basic progress. They get bored just like people do, and they can even regress if their training doesn't continue to challenge them. Advanced training can serve to keep a dog interested, which ultimately sustains gains they've made doing basic work.
Is It Right for Your Dog?
Slow and steady is the name of the game in advanced dog obedience training. Puppies, for obvious reasons, should not be introduced to advanced skills. Young dogs are usually entered into basic training programs around 5 months of age, presuming they've been socialized. Advanced training is a subsequent judgment call based on the dog's maturity, skills, and continued receptivity.
For more information, contact a dog training company like Ridge Side K9.