One of the easiest mistakes that can be made when training your dog is not paying attention. If your attention is elsewhere for even a short while, suddenly you may find that your puppy is off doing unspeakable things to you’re your furniture in the living room. You can not properly correct him unless you catch him red handed. All puppies have an incredibly short attention span. So, even just five minutes ago no longer exists. They will not make the mental connection when you are yelling about something they did minutes ago. When you can not pay attention to your puppy, he should then be in a safe place, like his crate, or perhaps by your side at all times.

Your dog will not know he has done something right when you fail to reward him for his good behavior. It is also crucial to communicate your praise to him in a language he can understand. The rewards do not necessarily always have to be something such as a treat. No matter what reward you may go with, your dog will need to connect the reward to his action in order for him to get the correct message. Instant praise is the best reward you could ever give. It’s instant gratification for your dog, and gives you a few seconds to provide the tasty treat reward if you have one. Those few seconds will fill in the gap between “Yay, I did things right!” and “Wow, what did I ever do to deserve an outcome like this?” This is extremely important during the earlier stages of the training process. This is especially true for when you are trying to get your dog to correlate his actions to your commands.

Another common mistake is to put things off for much too long. You may look at your little puppy, and think “it’s not absolutely necessary for him to need to learn anything just yet”. But what about walking on a leash, stay, coming when you call? This is especially true when a puppy’s natural instinct is to generally be by your side anyway, without incentive. But if you let things go for too long, your pup will not want to cooperate any longer. Training while your pup is still relatively young is the most solid way to get the basics into your dog’s head for good.