I’m planning on getting a dog soon and would love some tips and tricks.
My tip is that when you take your dog for a walk, before crossing any street make them sit and wait for you to tell them to cross.
It helped when my dog got out a few times he would only walk around the block and never cross streets or run into traffic.
Positive reinforcement of the behaviour you want to see is way way better than punishing behaviour you don’t like. If you consistently redirect bad behaviours, and reward good ones, then you don’t need to be around for the dog to choose the better behaviour.
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In addition to this, building up a behavior by shaping is much more powerful that luring into the behavior or capturing it. Everything I’ve taught my dog by shaping she enthusiastically loves to do, to the point where it’s hard to get her to stop. It’s like solving a puzzle for them, so they associate the behavior with something fun.
Actually, when trying to prevent “extinction” (which is a behaviorist term for when a learned behavior stops happening), ie when trying to get a new behavior to stick, randomly inconsistent reinforcement prevents extinction better than consistent reinforcement.
Consistent reinforcement is ideal for initial learning of a task, but to make the behavior stick when you’re not around, or when you don’t have treats in your pocket, you want to start slowly taking the reinforcement away.
Basically you follow a decaying probability curve of reinforcement, where at the end you’re only giving a treat once every five or ten times they do the behavior.