Today, let’s talk about how to actually train your Havanese yourself. Don’t get me wrong. There is actually nothing wrong with letting an institute train you Havanese. However, there are some training you must provide in order to have your Havanese to behave well at your home. For example, having an institute potty train your Havanese doesn’t guarantee your Havanese to go to the washroom properly at your home. Besides, provide all training yourself can give you a great sense of achievement. What I am going to show you is some of the training secrets that can make your brilliant Havanese even more brilliant.
The Two Big Categories of Training: Living & Playing Tricks
When it comes to training Havanese, I usually like to make things more clear by classifying training into two big categories. The first one I call living and that includes potty training, training to eat properly, training to sleep properly and training to be quiet, etc. The second one is what I all “playing tricks”. That includes another that is not absolutely necessary. “Hand”, “jump”, and “roll” are definitely cool tricks but they are not really essentially and it has nothing to do with behaving properly. For many owners, teaching them the living part is already enough and satisfying. Yet, it’s always fun to have your Havanese learn a few simple tricks.
The Secret of Potty Training
There are rumors about Havanese is not as easy to be potty trained as some other dogs. That’s actually a misunderstanding. The reason that Havanese are harder to be potty trained are due to some human error. Let me describe the common human mistake here. Since Havanese are very small dogs, owners usually have a tendency to carry them to their potty. That is absolutely wrong. You should encourage them to walk to the potty themselves. Otherwise, they would think that they shouldn’t need to walk to the potty when they need to poo. If the owners don’t make the mistake, they can be potty trained much more easily.
The Three Steps Training Loop
In many ways, human and dogs are similar. To be more accurate, human brain has a part that takes care of logic and a part that is almost like an animal brain. In other words, there is the conscious part of brain that makes us very different from other animals and there is the subconscious, emotional part of our brain that behaves very much like an animal. It is not surprising to find similarities between human and dogs. Anyway, the point I want to make is that human and dogs can be trained very similarly. Training is very similar or even the same as habit building depending on how you look at it. The most effective way to do it is to use a three-step loop. The loop goes like this: trigger, desired action, and reward. Let me explain that briefly here. First, you want to use the same trigger to let your Havanese know that it’s time to do the specific action. A common trigger is a voice command like “hand” or “sit”. Then you want to guide your Havanese to do the desired action. For example, after your “sit” voice command, you may want to gently push down your Havanese so he begins to see. You should let your Havanese do it himself once he knows how to do it. Then comes the reward point. You can simply give your Havanese some snack like a piece of dog biscuit to let him know that he just did something right.
Consistency Almost Always Beat Flashes of Brilliance
Like many things in life, consistency is more important than having flashed of brilliance. Training your Havanese shares the same idea. It doesn’t take long to figure why one owner trains his Havanese better than the other. Nine times out of ten, the owner of the worse trained Havanese simply didn’t make the effort to consistently train his Havanese. He may have instead trained his Havanese a lot during weekends but that simply can’t beat the owner that consistently train his Havanese everyday. That actually makes a lot of sense. Just think about yourself. How do you make yourself do very good at a certain thing? That’s right. You have to do it every single day.
Keep The Training Short
I would say that your Havanese don’t get boring as easily as a person, your Havanese can still get pretty bored with the training session is made too long. I bet you hate those 3-hour lectures that you may have to attended when you were in college. Your Havanese don’t like long training session either. You just have to the training short and brief and do it every day and you will see the improvement of your Havanese slowly and gradually. Short training sessions result in small and consistent improvement and this is kind of having compound interest for your Havanese’s ability.
Make It Clear Who is the Boss
In order for the training to go well, having reward is not enough. You have to let your Havanese know who the boss is. Use the “no” command when he is not behaving right. Remember that if you let him behave badly once, he will do it again in the future. That’s just how animals and humans behave. If you don’t stop your Havanese the first time, it is like you are allowing your Havanese to develop bad habits. Good luck stopping your Havanese the second time. It gets exponentially harder. Soon, you will find yourself give up when it is close to impossible to stop your Havanese to misbehave.
Havanese Seems to Be Able To Get Along with Children Well
Most Havanese naturally get along well with children. It is nice that you usually don’t have to put a lot of effort into training that aspect of their daily life. Still, you don’t want to be risky and think that your Havanese will 100% behave perfectly and not going to hurt your kids. It is always better to be too safe than being too risky.
