Is Balanced Puppy Training A Good Way to Teach Your Pup?

Should you use balanced puppy training or positive reinforcement puppy training for your new pup?

In the training world, there are two distinct and different camps of thought when it comes to training methods.

What is Balanced Puppy Training?

Balanced puppy training uses rewards when the puppy does what you want, and punishment when they make mistakes.

Some examples of this are jerking or popping the leash to the side when the puppy gets out of position on a walk. Spraying them with a water bottle for chewing something.  Shouting “No,” when your puppy does an unwanted action. Pinning a pup down when they nip or until they submit when they aren’t listening.

Some trainers take it further, and incorporate punishment training tools to those methods. A prong collar is a metal collar that goes around your dog’s neck with teeth that pinch down onto your dog’s neck when they get in front or pull on the leash.

A shock collar introduces a sharp electrical current to the dog every time the human presses a button on a remote control.

Many balanced trainers use softer more positive sounding names for these tools such as a pinch collar or an E collar. These names sound far less harsh than the more accurate punishment centric names.

What is Positive Reinforcement Puppy Training?

Positive reinforcement puppy training involves rewarding the puppy when it does the thing that you want and doing nothing or ignoring it when it does things you don’t want.

For example, someone may lure a puppy into a sit and the instant their butt hits the ground,  say a marker like “yes,” then give them a pet, treat or affection. If the pup doesn’t sit, you move the treat back to their lips and try again. Or if your pup is too distracted, maybe you try again later in an easier, less distracting environment.

For positive reinforcement puppy training, when puppies dont do what we want or make mistakes, we break the action into a smaller portion of the exercise and try again.

For example, if you are trying to get your puppy to lay down, you might hold a treat to their lips and gradually move the hand down to lure them until they are laying down. But if the pup only tracks the treat halfway down, positive puppy trainers may say the marker, and then reward the pup when it dips down as low as it’s willing to – at first.

After a few more practice reps, you try to lure the puppy down a little lower, then reward that progress. Eventually you get your pup to lay on the floor and that’s when you say the marker and reward them. This is the easy way to teach sit, lay down, sit up or stand using positive reinforcement puppy training.

So for positive reinforcement puppy training, if the puppy does what you want, you mark and reward them. If they don’t do what you want, you make it easier, then try again. And if the puppy does something you don’t want, we ignore them and be boring.

Ignoring a pup or being boring works because anything a dog is doing when you give it attention is what you are rewarding and training them to do. And dogs don’t make much of a distinction between good attention (marker and treat) or bad attention (yelling no).

An easy way to train your pup with positive puppy training is something we call celebrating, rewarding the pup when it does the things you want on his or her own.

Balanced Puppy Training Results

Obviously when you’re trying to teach a young puppy, or an adult, the most important thing is the results that you achieve.

Does balanced puppy training work? If you watch a trainer using balanced training methods, you may think so.

When a dog pulls on the leash and experiences an unpleasant consequence from the collar, they may stop pulling in that moment. But stopping a behavior through an unpleasant consequence isn’t the same as teaching the puppy what you want them to do instead.

Positive Reinforcement Puppy Training Results

By contrast, positive reinforcement puppy training motivates the puppy to want to do the thing that you want.

By rewarding the things you want, the animal’s goal aligns with yours. You want your dog to stop pulling on the leash, your dog wants the treats, affection or attention they get when they walk with you.

Every animal on the planet needs motivation. Birds want to build a nest, squirrels want to store their nuts. In this case, dogs want attention, affection or treats.

Think about it from a human perspective. Do you do things for free? Even in your social life there are rewards such as a returned smile, knowing you made someone happy, fixing a problem, or just being there for someone.

They’re not tangible, but those interactions from others are rewards.

Behavior is a result of repetition. If something happens frequently enough, for long enough (roughly 66+ days for dogs), it becomes habit.

So if you punish a dog or force it to do something, its goal and motivation is to do the opposite. Hard to form a habit when the subject’s motivation is to stop what you want to achieve.

But by rewarding it, you motivate the subject (in this case your puppy) to want to do the action. Repeat that enough and you have a behavior!

Puppy Training Methods Conclusion

We’ve worked with hundreds if not thousands of dogs who continued to get into the trash, jumped up on people, chewed the wrong thing or other unwanted behaviors despite the fact that they were punished when they did them.

The problem with force and punishment is it demotivates the student. If someone forces you to do something, as soon as they stop forcing, you’re usually going to move away or do the opposite.

When we’re teaching a child, student or new employee, we don’t typically yell at them or slam the desk when they make mistakes and then say good job when they do it correctly.

In fact, if a parent found out that their teacher was punishing their children for making mistakes, they would be rightfully upset.

As an employer, I don’t yell at my employees when they make a mistake, instead we fix the mistake first and then ask them later, privately, what made them do the thing that they did.

This gives us the opportunity to re-educate the employee on the proper method. If you yell at your employee for making mistakes, the employee is most likely going to try to hide it when it happens in the future instead of fixing the problem.

But employees and students aren’t babies. Puppies are. We just don’t think it’s right, or ethical, to punish an innocent baby who doesn’t know what you want them to do. Or that you are mad at something they don’t realize you don’t like.

That’s why we exclusively use positive training methods that motivate the puppy to want to do what you want them to do.

A Balanced Puppy Training Experience

Recently a puppy parent contacted us after hiring a trainer who used balanced puppy training methods.

I was pretty sad and disappointed to hear of some of the training methods they used on her then 12 week-old puppy.  Fortunately the mom recognized the balanced puppy training methods weren’t motivating her pup and so she discontinued those private sessions and started puppy classes with us.

The puppy’s mom was gracious enough to sit down with us after a recent puppy class to discuss her experience with balanced puppy training.

Fortunately in this case, Hemmingway did not develop a lot of the fear responses that we see from puppies who are subjected to balanced puppy training methods.

Often these puppies are fearful of new situations, people that look like the trainer or the exercises during which they were punished.

When using balanced puppy training, instead of motivating the puppy to want to walk with us, sit, or lay down, the puppy’s motivation is to do the exact opposite.

We like to say that the job title is Dog Trainer, not dog punisher. The best teachers are inspiring and uplifting. It’s rare that people respond to instructors who focus their efforts on punishing mistakes versus discussing them.

In addition to balanced puppy training creating confidence and behavioral problems, training should not be the priority when you have a new puppy.

Just like human children, we don’t send them to first grade to start learning. First we send them to preschool and kindergarten so they can learn the constructs of being in school, navigating social situations with their peers, the concept of learning, practicing homework, etc.

There are a number of lessons that puppies can only learn from socializing with other puppies. This is why supervised socialization is included in every class in our puppy school.

You can train a puppy or dog its entire life. You can only build your puppy’s confidence, social skills, manners and bite inhibition (not using their teeth with their mouth) when they are young.

This is why our puppy school places a heavy focus on socialization and puppy play time. Your puppy needs to learn social lessons by playing and interacting with other puppies (adult dogs don’t really count) when they are young.  Puppies give off a pheromone that causes adult dogs to not give your pup the feedback it needs. Since other puppies have it too, they give much better feedback.

In fact, puppies learn more about bite inhibition from one hour’s worth of socialization with other puppies than if a puppy trainer worked with your puppy 24 hours a day for a week straight! This is why it’s so much more beneficial to take a young puppy to a socialization class versus individual training.

Balanced Puppy Training Conclusion

There are a number of benefits to positive reinforcement puppy training, while balanced puppy training can result in behavior problems that last a long time and are very difficult to fix.

After working with over 8,000 puppies, we have never needed to use any punishment to teach them. So if it’s not necessary to punish a puppy, it doesn’t work as well as positive reinforcement puppy training and can create behavioral problems later, we don’t believe it’s ever appropriate to use balanced puppy training methods.

If you have a young puppy and are curious about our puppy school, click the button below for more information.

Omaha Puppy Socialization Classes