Choosing Your Dog’s Name

By: Dennis Fetko, Ph.D., “Dr. Dog”
www.DrDogsBehaviorSolutions.com

Because dog confusion is a major obstacle to training success, what you name your dog and how you use that name can determine your success in his training and behavior.

Dogs are vocal, not verbal. How words sound is important to them, so consider that then choosing names and commands. To your dog, the words “No,” “Know,” “Beau” and “Joe” are the same sound; the dog will have trouble knowing which you mean. If you name him “Beau” and use “No!” as a reprimand, saying, “Beau, you know what I want!” reprimands him twice although you didn’t intend a single one!

You always want your dog to come to you when you call him, so how much sense does it make to name your dog “Beau” and use “NO!” as your reprimand? He’ll have trouble knowing whether you called him or yelled at him.
I like to have a dog choose his name. There are two ways to do this. First, spend enough time with the dog to really get to know his personality and select a suitable name. For example, when new to us my Husky-mix not only jumped on me, he pinned me to the wall and took stuff out of my shirt pocket! I said to my wife: “Look at this! I’m getting mugged!” Naturally, he became Mugger! A client had a very rambunctious Great Dane pup and I love the name she chose: Chaos! Let the dog earn his name!

Another way is to make a list of your favorite names and–in a playful and animated voice–try them on the dog. The one to which the dog reacts best is IT! And he WILL react differently to different names! Try it!

Contrary to popular belief, a dog’s name should change with every new owner. The old thought was that once a dog recognized hits name, you couldn’t or shouldn’t change it. Wrong! Since many owners make the mistake of using the name with a reprimand, or even AS the reprimand, if you keep the old name you tell the dog you’re one of THEM–the former crew. If the dog is now yours, you can’t presume former owners did everything right. If they did, you probably wouldn’t have him. And you’re trying to tell the dog this is a new start in a new home, right? Then why use the old name–especially when it was likely used negatively in the past?
Be sure to teach the dog his new name by using it only with things the dog likes such as treats, praise, meals and love and affection. And don’t choose a new name that sounds a lot like the old one, like “Bo” and “Noah”.
Use the new name consistently and positively ONLY with things the dog likes and within a week or two he should respond nicely. We changed the names of two of our dogs and now they ignore the old names.

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The author, Dr. Dennis Fetko, “Dr. Dog” is a world-renowned animal behaviorist who has appeared on the 20/20 television show, managed the reintroduction of captive-bred Arabian Oryx into the Saudi Arabian National Wildlife Research Center, and made a presentation at the South American Veterinary Congress. His ebook, Dr. Dog’s FAST, EASY FUN Behavior Solutions, reveals his proven methods for eliminating barking, jumping, chewing, digging, pulling and his puppy housetraining methods. Click Here for more information.

Easy Dog Training Tips

Because keeping a dog at home could be costly for most people, hiring professional dog trainers would ultimately make keeping a pet at home a burden. This may be a problem if you do not have the right knowledge in training dogs because we all know how untrained dogs tend to damage things around the house or annoy other people by barking excessively and running around loosely. Thankfully, there are a lot of easy dog training tips that could help you make your pet handling more convenient and even fun. You could find various books and articles either from offline or online resources. Ebooks on dog training are extremely popular among dog trainers and ordinary pet owners as well so you can surely benefit from these. These ebooks are also a lot cheaper than the fees of professional dog trainers so you would definitely be able to save a lot and still manage to teach your dog appropriate behavior.

Some of the easy dog training tips that you would find in these ebooks is the proper way of giving instructions and rewards to your dog. A lot of people find it difficult to train their dogs but that is just because they lack patience. Along with patience, it is crucial for you to always be consistent and precise in teaching your dogs tricks or new behaviors. Dogs are, of course, slower than humans when it comes to learning so you should be extra patient in teaching them tricks. It might take a long time before your dog learns a single behavior so repetition is extremely necessary.

Also, dogs are unable to use logic and merely rely on associations for their learning. This is the reason why your commands should always be specific. When teaching your dog command such as “come” and “sit”, you should never mix the commands with other words. For dogs, even a single word could change the entire meaning of the command so using different words would only lead to confusion. In order to become successful in easy dog training, you have to learn to give rewards immediately after the display of the correct behavior. This way, the dog is able to build a strong association between the behavior and the reward.