If your dog is on a special diet, don’t worry. AnimalKind is an animal welfare accreditation from the BC SPCA and certified trainers use reward-based methods. If you're in British Columbia, Canada, you can look for an AnimalKind certified dog trainer. Or if you want to know more about the scientific research, check out my dog training science resources page which lists articles on dog training methods (and places where you can read about those articles for free). If you want to know more, check out my article seven reasons to use reward-based dog training. Those risks include making the dog aggressive or fearful, and these are serious problems that can take a long time to fix (if at all). That’s because there are risks to using aversive methods (technically, positive punishment and negative reinforcement).
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So in other words, you want a dog trainer who will use food to train your dog. It is possible to use other types of reward, such as play, but food is more efficient because it’s faster to deliver it’s better for most dog training scenarios (for example, if you’re teaching a dog to sit-stay, play will encourage your dog to jump out of the sit) and all dogs love food. In practice, the reward that works best is food. Others call themselves force-free or humane dog trainers, to distinguish themselves from people who use aversive techniques such as electric shock, prong collars, leash ‘corrections’, ‘alpha rolls’ or the like. That’s why some dog trainers call themselves positive reinforcement dog trainers. Technically speaking, using rewards to make a behaviour increase in frequency is called positive reinforcement. Reward-based dog training is based on either giving a reward (to make a behaviour more likely to happen again) or withholding a reward (to make the behaviour less likely to occur). However, just because you see those words on someone’s website, does not mean they actually use those methods (see below for the questions you should ask).
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When choosing a dog trainer, the most important thing is to find a trainer who uses reward-based dog training methods, which they might call positive reinforcement, force-free, or humane training methods. The most important choice in hiring a dog trainer