Be Your Dog's Leader

It may be hard to imagine, but your four legged canine friend is a pack animal and has all the instinctive wiring you would find in its wild counterparts, including wolves!

Fido may be cute as a button and fraction of the size of a wild dog, but underneath all the generations of breeding and domestication they are still thinking in terms of being in a pack and responding instinctively to whoever the pack leader is and the dynamics of the particular pack they are a member; your family.

You must understand the real fundamental nature of your dog if you expect to be able to train them properly and frequently, owners experiencing problems with their pet are ignoring the reality of how their dog is thinking and analyzing their surroundings.

In an ideal owner-dog relationship, you are the leader in your pet's eyes; where this is not the case is when problems are invariably encountered, so you must assume the leadership role, the leader of the pack, to allow your pet to naturally be assimilated into your family and behave in an acceptable manner. Your dog places a very high priority and importance on leadership, and expects to be dominated or to dominate with regards to behavior and you see this whenever a group of dogs congregate there will be a natural tendency to either be submissive or dominating depending on the nature of the dog itself.

In your dog's mindset, it is a member of a pack; you, your family and friends are all pack members as far as they are concerned.

This is very useful when it comes to training your pet as you can tap into the ready made mindset of your dog and assume automatically the role of leader; your dog will naturally follow this as part of the natural order of things and this is also why dogs have become so interwoven with human society. Dogs have a natural desire to please and to respect you and they will also readily and eagerly look to you for guidance and command which makes for a very effective training results.

By assuming a leadership role, you do not have an automatic pass to be aggressive or bullying to your dog; dog's have different temperaments and just because they are prepared to be subordinate to you does not mean you must not accord them a proper degree of respect in return. More than this, negative methods of training a dog tend to only deliver very short term results in encouraging or discouraging behavior. More importantly, shouting, hitting or humiliating your dog will have an adverse impact on the relationship your dog has with you which will make training in the longer term more difficult; your dog bases their loyalty to you upon trust to a very large extent.

Reinforce your role as pack leader by following a consistent approach with your dog and not only when training, but in day-to-day life. Your dog must be made to understand by deeds, what the rules and limitations are; letting your dog get away with misdemeanors or if you accept certain behaviors which in the dog's mind is not the conduct of a subordinate pack member, will eventually lead you to being viewed as weak or not serious and therefore, in your dog's mind, not to be followed, you are subordinate to your dog so they will naturally dominate you.

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