Dog training ideally refers to the process of teaching behaviors and skills to dogs. This includes training in terms of command responses, and also aiding the dog on how to cope best in stressful or difficult situations. In most cases, this includes classical conditioning, non-associative learning, and also operant conditioning.
All these are aimed at achieving a goal which is the dog getting to learn a certain skill or a predetermined behavior pattern. The person who conducts training is a dog trainer.
The aspect of dogs and training is approached from a variety of perspectives. There are also a couple of objectives that are tied to this practice as well. Training ideally extends from the usual obedience training to other specialized scenarios like law enforcement, hunting, and search rescue, the military, working with livestock, entertainment, detections and dog sports among many other applications.
Dogs are pack animals. This is why the dogs of the wild still interact well with their domestic counterparts. Many of the domesticated dogs through breeding or instincts correctly interpret and also respond to signals which are given by their human handlers.
There is still a lot of controversy regarding the right approaches to dog training. There are those trainers who are referred to as positive trainers and those who are termed to as traditional trainers. Most of the positive trainers use positive reinforcement in order to elicit, motivate and also change the behaviors of the dogs. The more traditional trainers recommend punishment. In this case, physical stimulus is the course and is used to elicit attention from the dogs. Dominance trainers are also common. People who take this stand believe that animals have an intrinsic feel of superiority and they would want to dominate others. This is the reason why they need ownership and taming.
There are many approaches used in dog training. There are those which are referred to as basic dog training classes. In this case, the humans apply the basic standards of human behavior with the belief that the dogs will also understand. The most tedious part of this is to actually communicate with the dog using a humane approach. The rule of the thumb here is to ensure you reward all the desired behavior and ignore all of those undesired behaviors.
Advanced training is also a common feature. This is a much complex kind of training. It is much suitable for dogs that have undergone basic training. On the other hand, there is also individualized dog training. This is applied to dogs which have urgent or rather unique training problems. Some of the personalized aspects in this training may relate to fear, aggression, biting, insecurity, excessive barking, hyperactivity, walking difficulties and also other destructive behaviors. In this case of training, the problem occurs naturally rather than happening in a classroom situation.
There are also cases where specialized dog training is conducted. In this case, the dogs are trained to handle specific tasks. These include police dogs, guard dogs, detection dogs, hunting dogs, and herding dogs among many others. Usually dogs would undertake specialized courses here. It is rare to find dogs with skill multiplicity.