Most puppies love to jump. However, you can make effective use of her inherent jumping abilities for acrobatic jumps and jumping through    hoops. Before you can teach your puppy to jump through a hoop, get her to jump over a straight barrier. Select a low height barrier in the initial sessions. Generally, you should keep the barrier at a height of one inch less than half of your puppy’s height.

It is important to get a check up done on your puppy to ensure that she does not have any physical problems. This will help in preventing any physical injuries that your puppy may face during the jumping training.

Once you have the barrier in place, let your puppy check it out. Discourage her from chewing the barrier. Do not push her into jumping. Encourage her to take the jump and reward her after the successful jump. Reward her even when she makes an effort for jumping. This will make the process interesting for her.

If your puppy is reluctant to jump, first let her walk over the barrier. After a few sessions, repeat the training and induce her to attempt to jump over the barrier. You should use verbal command “Jump” when she is about to proceed for jumping.

If you want to make your puppy jump through a hoop, a good idea is to use a hula-hoop. You can keep the hoop on the ground and encourage her to go through it a few times before you train her to jump through the hoop. You can reward her with food rewards and verbal praises even when she walks through the hoop.

Once she goes through it comfortably, let someone hold the hoop and use the same process and verbal command that you had used earlier trying to make her jump through the hoop. This will help her understand what you expect of her.

Sometimes it might take a while before your puppy masters the art of jumping. Have patience and continue with your efforts. Later on, you can use the command “Over” to make her jump over the barrier and “Through” to make her jump through the hoop.

Many puppy owners face a problem with the command “Come”. The command  “come,” means recalling your puppy. However, many times a puppy will refuse and not come when called. This behavior can be irritating for the owners and also it can be a precursor for disobedience and arrogance in your puppy.  

Before we move on to finding a solution to this problem it is necessary to find the reason for the problem. This is very important for the solution for this behavior because the problem lies in eliminating the reasons that your puppy disobeys. Once you are able to address the reasons, the puppy will have no reason to disobey.

The reason why a puppy will not come when called may be that the puppy associates the “come” command with a host of unwelcome and painful consequences. Recall in your mind the situations when you call your puppy, it may be either for taking her back home after the walk, confining her to the crate, giving a bath, putting on the leash & collar or to give punishments.

Now imagine what would be the reaction of the puppy to a command that means the end of her freedom and play, confinement, taking a bath, punishment or any other unwelcome situation.

The failure of recall training is mostly because puppy owners do not adopt the proper approach for recall training. The tactical way should be to make the command “Come” enticing and inviting for her. You should try to dispel her thoughts of unpleasant activities associated with “Come” and associate the command with activities and experiences that are fun and enjoyable for your puppy.

The more you associate the command with pleasant activities, the more your puppy will obey the command. Gradually you have to make it less predictable and hold some surprises for the puppy so that she can associate it with a mix of activities.  

If your puppy does not obey the “come” command, review your behavior and analyze what you have been doing that makes the puppy that has been trained to obey the command show signs of disobedience. The most important aspect of preventing failure of recall training is the timing of rewards and punishments. Never make the mistake of punishing the puppy when she obeys the command after three or four repetitions.

If you punish her for coming after three or four calls, she actually will believe that the punishment is for coming. How can you expect your puppy to obey the command when she has learned that coming means punishment?

You should not punish or reprimand your puppy when she comes. The most you can do is not reward her if she does not obey the command at the first call. Last but not the least, you must keep on rewarding the puppy with surprise treats and goodies even after she has perfected the “Come” command because puppies are situational learners and need positive reinforcement for good behavior.

In many ways, we think that our dogs are just dummies and act without any solid reasons. Hold on! This belief may be simply false! Your puppy is extremely smart

How do Dogs Think? and intelligent! It can think about you, how you act and respond! It can also assess and analyze your actions and reactions by reading through your mind! These are inherent to dogs as they were created to think and respond. They can be intelligent just because most of the dog owners have never cared to learn how to think and act like them.

Dogs do possess a number of highly refined thinking processes that help them to respond in a particular manner. Here are some of the methods by which your dog can think and act:

Non-verbal thinking: Most probably, we are all confused as what our dogs will be thinking when they are not doing anything! Nature has provided dogs an extremely innovative and highly sophisticated thinking process called “non-verbal thinking”. By using these techniques, your dog can assess, predict and analyze your actions, gestures, words and later respond with a firm reaction.

Just remember your dog wagging his tail and pleading with his eyes to direct you to provide his dinner? It is more possible that your dog is imagining (or trying to set up ‘imaging’ in his mind) the words, actions and movements you always say and do before serving his food.

Imagery and Picture: It is well established that dogs think in many sensory impressions; pictures of visual, sound and odor that exist around them. They have a mental mechanism that allows them to form, create, etch and experience in their minds certain images, odors and sounds.

They can perceive future images in their brain and act accordingly in response to the given situation. You puppy may create an image of you coming back to home and hug him with an enthusiastic greetings. It’ll also create a picture that tells him to jump up with joy and start circling around his owner.

These pictures are always composed just before the future event and dogs are the presumed to be the masters in these exercises. Your puppy can always imagine things, perceive invisible movements and experience future events in his mind before actually see them in real.

If your dog anticipates something in his mind, and by chance if they do not happen in reality, then they can get really frustrated and anxious. These negative behaviors will pave for a future display of indecent behavior in them. If your puppy gets to experience the same episodes every other day, then it may create a conflicting situation in his mind. Consistently conflict-ridden mind will make the dogs out of sync and reality; this will eventually lead to deep rooted frustration and many ill-conceived behaviors.

If dogs really do collect and recall images of their masters and other family members, and other objects and experiences of life, this can come very beneficial to us, and we can share the information for mutual benefit and use.

Unfortunately, dog owners never try to understand how dogs can think and behave, which subsequently leads to future occurrence of misbehavior and bad habits. Dogs are known to have a problem in associating images and pictures to real life incidences and experiences.