Getting mad at your dog for his bad behavior can be a recipe for disaster.

Maybe you even think it seems like willful disobedience. While problems may not surface immediately, they may surface later.

I’m not pointing a finger. If this sound familiar, it’s time to do things differently, because your present strategy is not working. Don’t think it’s too late to make those changes. But before we look at how to change, let’s look at this from your dog’s perspective.

Stop Getting Angry at Your Dog

Part of the solution is to learn to project calm energy. Your dog will do much better with you being calm. Getting mad causes your dog to feel stressed and anxious.

When you get angry at your dog, you express your anger with action and emotions.
Your dog responds to your actions by freezing, running away or biting. The last thing you want is to cause your dog to bite you.
Let’s look at how you can set yourself and your dog up to succeed.

A Strategy to Stop Being Mad at Your Dog

• Make your list of all the things your dog does you don’t like and you want to change.
• Prioritize your list.
• Next to each bad dog behavior you must write down what you would prefer your dog to do. This is the easy part.
• You already know what you want, right?
• Don’t jump, sit.
• Don’t chew my stuff, chew your dog toys, and the list goes on.

Here’s an example of how to get good dog behavior:

• Your dog jumps on the counter in the kitchen to get food. Let’s say you would prefer him to stay on his matt on the fringe of the kitchen while you are cooking.
• Make “stay on matt” your preferred behavior.
• Next, begin to teach your dog to go to his matt and finally lay down on his matt.
• Another critical ingredient here is to practice every day.
• Practice not only when you are cooking, but do practice set ups as separate training exercises.
• This means mock cooking scenarios with food on the counter. This allows to concentrate on the training and not your cooking.

Quit getting ticked off at your dog - train your dog until you get the results you want

Then start on the next bad dog behavior on your list.

If you think about it you’ve spent a lot of wasted energy getting upset about your dog’s problems only to have them resurface and never really go away.

If you had taken all that energy and put it to training the good behavior, you’d be ahead of the game. It’s never too late to start. So, what are you waiting for?

Let’s do some list making and dog training! It really takes much less energy than getting mad at your dog.

Together We Can Raise A Happy and Obedient Dog

Jim Burwell, is Houston’s most respected dog trainer for 30 years, serving over 11,000 clients. Jim works with you and your entire family in helping your dog be the best dog ever.