WHAT IS POSITIVE TRAINING?
Positive training uses rewards to facilitate learning, rather than punishment or correction. The key to positive training is to determine what motivates your dog and then use these motivators as rewards for a correct performance. You can use food, toys, verbal praise or a combination of these to reward your dog – in fact you can use anything that your dog finds reinforcing. When you are training a new behaviour, it is important to reward your dog EVERY time the correct action is performed.
Positive training methods are successful because animals tend to keep doing things that are rewarding and stop doing things that are not rewarded or ignored.
Some people think that positive training never teaches a dog that particular behaviours are unacceptable. This is a common misconception. Positive trainers do teach this concept, but they don’t use punishment techniques to do so.