Senior dog training

One of the most common questions owners ask is: is it possible to train an adult dog? After all, they say, it’s not for nothing that folk wisdom says: “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” However, in this case, folk wisdom is not at all right.

Dogs learn all their lives, and you can train a dog of any age. Moreover, regular exercise is the best prevention of pet dementia.

And it is always insanely sorry to see how an adult or elderly dog ​​was given up, and she toils from boredom.

Dogs that have been properly trained since puppyhood are perfectly trained as adults. However, if you are just starting to train an adult dog, you should be patient. Because adult dogs already have formed habits, not always good ones, and retraining is much more difficult than learning from scratch. But, nevertheless, nothing is impossible. And positive reinforcement, when applied correctly, works wonders.

Older dogs sometimes suffer from illnesses, so they may have difficulty, for example, changing their position several times in a row (sit down, get up, lie down, etc.) In addition, the dog may develop senile dementia, she may forget learned or annoyed. Therefore, you should be patient and show indulgence, again make classes short, like with a puppy, and break the task into very small steps (even if it seems to you that “what is not clear here”).

Senior dog training is built on play and in short sessions. And this is quite enough in the vast majority of cases. So not everything is as scary and difficult as it might seem.

This article is an excerpt from the book of Ekaterina Kastritskaya, Irina Goryukova and Natalya Nikitina “There is no such thing as a good dog of a bad breed”.

You can learn more about raising and training dogs of any age with humane methods by using our video courses.