Dog Manners Classes Eastern Suburbs – Training Vs. Management

Dog Manners Classes Eastern Suburbs – Training Vs. Management

Did you know that there’s a difference between managing and training your dog? People often confuse these two things. While both are important and often used together, they are two different things. Keeping your dog on a lead around distractions to avoid unwanted behaviours is management. Teaching your dog a new behaviour around distractions is training. In my dog manners classes in Eastern Suburbs we focus on both.

Dog Training

Dog training simply means teaching your dog to do something. This can be as simple as working on basic commands such as sit, down and stay, or something more difficult like navigating an agility course. The most important thing about dog training is that your dog is learning to do something – or to stop doing something. There is an almost endless list of behaviours we can train a dog to do.

Behaviour Management

The biggest difference between managing a dog and training one is that the dog is not learning anything when we only manage them. Instead, we are controlling things in the dog’s environment or the dog himself to prevent certain unwanted behaviours. For example, we may never be able to train a dog to overcome a fear of thunder compeletely. However, we can do certain things to manage the dog’s fear to make it easier for them to cope, such as providing calming medication or a safe place for the dog to hide during thunderstorms. In this case you’re not training a dog to behave a certain way, but rather managing the dog’s reactions.

Here are a few examples of management:

• Putting a food aggressive dog in another room during meal times
• Using a Easy Walk Harness to make walking a dog easier and prevent pulling
• Isolating aggressive dogs
• Avoiding situations and things the dog is scared of

In all of these instances, the dog is not learning anything, they are simply being managed

While management and dog training are two different things, they are not exclusive.

Management is an important part of dog training, and is often needed at the start to be able to create a situation where the dog is able to learn. Dog behavior management is an important tool in preventing any unwanted behaviors until your dog is trained to behave differently in those situations.

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