How to Establish Dominance With Your Lab Puppy
- 1). Socialize your lab puppy. Exposing your puppy to numerous places, sounds and animals means your puppy will look to you for guidance, thereby reinforcing your place as leader.
- 2). Assert your dominance in all situations. Implement a "nothing in life is free" policy whereby your puppy has to work for things like praise and food. For example, when feeding the puppy, place the food bowl on the ground and make the puppy sit and stay until you say "okay."
- 3). Reprimand your puppy for dominant behaviors such as growling. Use a strong command or growl yourself for particularly egregious behaviors. Accompany the command with a display of authority such as an assisted sudden sit down -- pushing, not hitting, the puppy's bum to the ground.
- 4). Walk through doorways before your puppy, so it learns to follow rather than lead. Puppies striving to learn their place in the hierarchy take their directions from you.
- 5). Praise your puppy for obeying your commands. A puppy that learns to take orders from you learns that you are dominant. Avoid overdoing the praise or the puppy may forget what it learned.
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