Impulse-Control Training (Puppies USA, Basic Training, Terry Long)

In this article Terry Long shows how to teach your dog through impulse-control training. This allows your puppy to learn self-restraint. For the first four to five months the puppy's life should include bite inhibition, drop it, leave it, and sit. For reward just use food from their regular everyday meals. For the bite inhibition, everytime the puupy bites you should ouch or something along those lines and set him in a time out place like a crate for a brief period of time. You can teach your pup to "drop it" by saying drop it and relinquishing the item from its mouth and replace it with a treat. To teach your pup to "leave it", place a treat under your foot. Once they start to try to get it tell them to leave it. When the pup finally backs away a quits trying give them a treat from you hand. Repeat this over and over again, it may take a while. To teach your pup to sit you reward him everytime he does it and eventually start saying sit and rewarding him at the same time. This is usually a preety quick process.

All of the impulse-training tips can be found in chapter 5, which is about different styles of learning. Operant conditioning is used in all of these, which is defined as the kind of learning that applies to voluntary behavior. Postive reinforcer is the reinforcement of a response by the addition of a reward. The bone will take the place of this. The schedule of the reward is continuous reinforcement. This is where the reward will be given after every correct response. Behavior modification takes place when the puppy finds out that when he gives the correct response, he will recieve a bone.