Pets

The researchers say that instead of working well, training approaches based on “dominance reduction,” like telling owners to eat in front of the dog or be sure they get through doors first can range from worthless to even making behaviors worse and being dangerous.

When your pet does something, the behavior either has a reward of its own (like digging a delicious hole in your garden or barking for the sheer joy of it) or it offers a hope of a reward from you. While you’re training your pet to perform a new behavior, you want to reinforce the behavior

The behavior of any creature can be shaped if we are patient. To shape an animal’s behavior, we reward their “baby steps” toward the behavior we want, until they are performing the action we wanted them to perform. This is the opposite of just pushing a dog to sit down or other means of forcing the behavior. Instead, we set a goal behavior for our pet then divide the goal into little increments that the pet can achieve.