How Do You Train a Guard Dog with Speciality Dog Training?

Guard dog training is a specialty type of dog training that can be challenging but rewarding. Here’s how you can get started with guard dog training.

Attack Dogs versus Guard Dogs

Before you begin specialty dog training, such as guard dog training, you’ll want to understand how a guard dog and an attack dog are different.

For starters, most people aren’t going to need an attack dog. Attack dogs are often used by police officers or the military for dangerous situations. Training attack dogs requires a lot of patience, consistency, and professional expertise. It wouldn’t be wise to try and train your dog to be an attack dog on your own, and it’s likely dangerous.

Furthermore, guard dogs aren’t usually trained to attack or behave aggressively towards strangers. Instead, a guard dog is trained to alert their owners to the presence of an intruder or stranger through barking or growling.

Here’s another look at the differences between an attack dog and a guard dog:

• Attack dogs will only act out aggressively if commanded to by their owners. Attack dogs that are poorly trained can be dangerous to their owners, strangers, and other animals.
• Guard dogs: Guard dogs are not trained to act aggressively towards a stranger. Guard dogs are instead trained to alert their owner to someone who might be an intruder.

While it’s often challenging to train your dog to be a guard dog without a trainer’s help, there are steps you can take to start preparing your dog for guard dog training.

Preparing Your Dog for Guard Dog Training

Successfully training a guard dog takes establishing a good framework for the training itself. Guard dogs require special training to help them discriminate between friends or foes, and the damage that a poor-trained guard dog can inflict can be severe.

A Guard Dog’s Personality

A guard dog should be confident in himself and his surroundings. This means they should be curious about new people or new areas but not shy around different people. Above all else, a guard dog should be confident enough to be assertive and obedient sufficient to listen to its owners. It’s important to remember that assertiveness does not mean aggressive.

A guard dog should be confident enough to approach strangers without backing away or hiding and protective of his territory, but not react out of fear or aggression.

The Importance of Socializing

A good guard dog is a socialized guard dog. Properly socializing your dog as a puppy helps ensure that your dog is confident and relaxed around other animals and strangers but still able to maintain alertness and a healthy suspicion of unfamiliar situations. The goal of socializing your guard dog is to help teach them to recognize you and your family members and not to be afraid of strangers.

While it’s easier to socialize a puppy, adult dogs can still be associated with persistent effort. Either way, socializing your dog helps equip them with the needed personality traits of a guard dog.

Understand Basic Commands

Because training a guard dog can be more challenging than training your dog the basics, it’s crucial that your dog already obeys your commands and is familiar with them; basic obedience training helps you and your dog develop trust in one another and lays the foundation you both need to take on more advanced training techniques.

Practice basic commands with your dog regularly, but keep training sessions short. A dog can learn more effectively with faster, more often training sessions rather than irregular, long sessions.

For guard dog training, your dog should be able to bark on command when someone is at your door or in your yard or stop barking with a command like “quiet.”

Russell’s K9 Academy: For All Your Speciality Dog Training

Training your dog to be a guard dog takes time and patience. But with Russell’s K9 Academy, you can successfully train your dog much faster. Get in touch today to learn more about our guard dog training program.