Dog Training – Can You Train an Older Dog?
Most people will tell you that it is impossible to teach an old dog new tricks. However, any dog, young and old can be trained with the proper dog training techniques, as long as you or your professional dog trainer can get its attention and reinforce the learned response positively. If you have a matured dog, it can still benefit from older dog training techniques.
Once you gain your dog’s attention, you can first teach it to obey one of the simplest dog commands, “sit”. You can easily reinforce this command by giving the dog treats every time it obeys.
Your dog learns best if it can associate the command with a positive reward. It doesn’t always have to be a food treat – even a word of praise or a hug can reinforce the expected outcome and can encourage your dog to repeat this action.
Dogs, especially puppies thrive on a lot of attention, physical touch and praise. So be generous with these every time your dog does something you like or approve of.
Another way to teach your dog is to use hand signals to go with the verbal command. During the early days of training your dog, you may have to apply gentle pressure on your dog’s lower body to make him understand that “sit” means to lower his body into a sitting position.
However slow your dog may be in understanding this command, do not hit him or give him verbal abuse as you will never succeed in training him this way. Once your dog perceives a threat, whether verbal or physical from you he will never acquire the response that you want. He would always associate training time as an undesirable period and may either show disinterest or repulsion every time you teach him a new trick or behavior.
Keep older dog training periods short but frequent. A session of about 20 minutes to teach a new trick is all you need, but you have to repeat this several times a day to make your dog remember what you are trying to teach him.
Although ideally, puppies should start being trained as early as 8-10 weeks, more matured dogs can still be taught simple commands such as sit, roll over, come and stay. These may seem like simple words, but they may become critical commands especially if you or your dog is facing an emergency situation. They are also useful commands if you want to discipline your otherwise hyperactive or even aggressive dog. For example, by teaching your dog to “stay” every time the door opens, he may unlearn a previous bad behavior of jumping on people as his way of welcoming them when they enter the room.
So if you have an older dog, do not think that he is no longer trainable. If you do not have any experience on dog training, it may be a good idea to hire a professional dog trainer who can help you teach your older dog simple commands.
