 When you play with your puppy and adult dog, you can easily play too rough and in time you will produce a very dominating or an aggressive dog. Problems like food guarding, biting, nipping, and many other problems can be a result when you play with your dog or pup too roughly. Children need to learn not to play rough, pulling on body parts of the dog, or hitting the dog. There is a child conditioning method which will help to condition the dog to minor child behavior such as poking and screaming around the dog. If you play too rough with a submissive dog, the dog may become fearful of you.
These safety measure are to teach the dog or pup to release it's toy with a selected release command. The dog must remain off the toy until given a command to go after the toy again and then again to be able to command the dog to release it's toy. You can then let the dog have the toy sometimes. But if you let the dog have the toy all the time he or she will think they have control over you, since you gave in and stopped the fight by letting him or her have it. Don't pull the toy out of a dog's mouth because this teaches the dog to fight with you, when you want him to simply open his mouth so you can have the toy. If you can get your dog or pup to open its mouth, to allow you to have the toy. The different commands you can use for commanding a dog to release are "Let go!", "Give!", "Out!" or in German "Aus!". The out and aus are used the most in protection dog training, if you wish to have your dog trained to become a protection dog. However, the other commands are fine to use too. It may be wise to check your local or nearest Schutzhund and National Personal Protection Dog Trials to find out the commands they accept in their trials, if you feel you may be interested in competing with your dog. You do need to be careful with a pup due to teething. Try not to pull very hard, as you may pull out some of your pup's teeth when they're not exactly ready to come out.
Doing the tug-of-war to a fearful and unconfident dog is very good to do. Adding a release command just tells the dog you are the boss and won't have any effect on building up your dog's confidence. For these dogs you can allow them to take the item more, as long as you add a few times where you have your dog release it by command.
You saw many people who pull an item away from the dog to take away from the dog while the dog is still holding onto it (when you're not trying to play tug-of-war) by it’s mouth or paws. This causes the dog to fight with you like when you are playing tug-of-war. This action will also cause the dog to become possessive and then later become dominating toward you. This can then lead to aggression problems. Fearful and unconfident dogs have low to moderate confidence. With a fearful and unconfident dog you probably don't have any aggression or dominating problems now but after a year or more the of playing tug-of-war without the release command included. You'll eventually develop your dog into a high confidence dog. Tug-of-war is used in training a pup and adult dog to become confident for the training in Schutzhund and Protection dog training. |
