TEACHING YOUR DOG THE WORD "NO"

Teaching your dog the word “NO” is great for many reasons, but the biggest reason is that once you’re dog understands it, it lays an excellent foundation for communicating to your dog that something is not acceptable. The greatest thing about it is that the dog does not have to be next to you either.  Once the dog understands “NO”, it works great at long distances too.

Believe it or not, there are still people out there who will say funny things like, “don’t ever say the word “NO” to your dog.. he’ll think that’s his name”. The same group will also tell you to not use “NO because it is not positive. As ridiculous as these things sound, and there are many others, I have heard these by self proclaimed animal behaviorists. I always go back to an example of a child. Children need to understand right from wrong, and it starts off with having an understanding and respect for the word “NO”.  If you think of some kids that you’ve seen that have no respect the word “NO”, it really comes from nothing more than their training, and their upbringing.

Just like an animal, over the course of time, the kids learned that the word “NO” began to have very little meaning. At the beginning of teaching the word “NO”, the parents may have very well backed up the word “NO“ with some sort of correction. But over the course of time, if that correction was not consistently used to backup the word “NO”,  the word “NO”  would eventually lose its impact. The exact same thing applies to animals.

I really like this behavior because once this is trained and your dog truly understands, you now have a great way of communicating with our dog when he is not next to you. 

Teaching Your Dog the Word “NO”

Based on your dog’s color, you now know whether or not to use some sort of training tool to use as a correction. If you are working with an ORANGE or RED dog, the great thing about introducing one of these tools in our stationary position dog training, you have already made the training of the word “NO” a lot easier to teach.

The whole idea in beginning to train this behavior is “pairing” the word “NO” with a light correction. When we “pair” something, it just means that both things will have the same meaning, so the word “NO” and the correction will have the same meaning early on.  Over the course of time, we will eventually fade out the correction and just say the word “No.

In order to begin to train this, you need to get your dog in a situation where you have the ability to get him to do something wrong, so that you can correct him. This means that you need to set up a situation.  Here are three examples:

For a RED or ORANGE DOG, you most likely will not have a problem finding something that he does wrong. There are so many other things that your dog might do that are not acceptable that you can use to train the word “NO”, but I think you get the idea. With the YELLOW, GREEN, or BLUE dog, you might have to be creative and set up a situation.

The tool that you’ll need is that same 30 foot long line that you used in training the “COME” behavior. Again, if you have a dog that’s smaller than 30 lbs. my suggestion would be to make a line out of something light like a ¼” nylon rope. You want to attach that to the CHAIN COLLAR or your dog’s collar.

If you have a problem, for example, with your dog getting into the trash, keep the trash can in its natural place, or an area that the dog is most likely to get into. As your dog makes his way over to the trash can and gets into it, say with word "NO", and pair that with the correction. As your dog begins to understand the word “NO”, you’ll find that you’ll begin to totally fade out the physical correction all together. Once this happens, your dog now understands the word “NO”.

The whole idea to using this training technique is that by using a physical correction combined with the word “NO” initially, it gives you the opportunity to send a message to the dog and let him know exactly what “NO” means.

TRAINING TOOLS

If you are training a dog that you feel you are really going to need to correct when pairing with the word "NO", it is a good idea to have something that will give you as much control as possible. As far as leashes go, I would highly recommend some very strong leather leash that is comfortable on your hands, and also strong for a dog that might really need more of a correction.

I would also recommend any kind of collar that will give you optimum control for RED or ORANGE DOGS such as:

Alternative Training Collar

Check Choke Collars

Titan Chain Collar

Control Ease Head Collar

Remington Nylon Check Cord

Control Ease Clicker

Titan Pinch Collar

Pet Attire Weave Check Training Collar

If you are dealing with BLUE, GREEN, OR YELLOW dog, you will probably want to use your dog's adjustable nylon collar that he wears.

DOG TRAINING TOOL INDEX

TRAINING YOUR DOG NOT TO JUMP

TRAINING YOUR DOG NOT TO RUN OUT THE DOOR

TRAINING YOUR DOG NOT TO BARK