As a dog owner, making your dog listen to you can be stressful. There are many methods for teaching a dog to respond to commands, but the most common are: operant conditioning using stimulation, punishment, reinforcement, social learning, and observational learning. These methods are effective in modifying the dog's behavior according to the owner's wishes. There are in-depth studies that explain the effectiveness of these techniques and how to obtain the best results. This article will mainly discuss how dogs learn; Their ability to understand what the coach wants through conditioning; How different stimuli cause different behaviors; The effectiveness of punishment in the dog's learning ability; How I taught my beagle, Mia, potty training and obedience tricks using operant conditioning; How I apply operant conditioning to train dogs to have a better chance of being adopted into the shelter. The first topic to discuss is operant conditioning. This method basically means learning based on the consequences of the response. Operant conditioning uses punishment or reinforcement as a stimulus to desired behavior. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essayThere are two types of punishment (positive and negative) and two types of reinforcement (positive and negative), according to scientist B.F. Skinner, who developed these principles in the 1950s (McLeod, 2015). Positive punishment is the inclusion of a bad consequence for bad behavior (McLeod, 2015), for example: if the dog digs in the yard, he will be hit on the head with a rolled up newspaper. There is nothing positive about positive punishment, and the punishment must be well timed, otherwise the effectiveness will decrease significantly, as shown in the Skinner graph below: (Coon & Mitterer, 2016) Negative punishment is considered a better option because it is simply the removal of a pleasant stimulus such as toys or play time (Rozas, 2012). If the dog does not follow the command, it starts ignoring it, this will cause confusion and also the dog will learn that that specific behavior will make you ignore it. According to Rozas (2012), positive reinforcement is the most used technique. It is the reward method. If the dog does something according to the command received, he receives a treat. Therefore, he will be conditioned to follow the owner's command if he wants to be rewarded with food or his favorite toy. Negative reinforcement is when the dog does what he is told just because he wants to make something bad go away. Shock collars are the perfect example of negative reinforcement (Rozas, 2012). The dog will understand that as long as he does what he is asked, nothing bad will happen to him. Dogs can take a long time to do what the trainer wants, and for this reason shaping is used. As Skinner stated, modeling means gradually shaping responses to a desired final model (Coon & Mitterer, 2016). It may take a long time for the dog to understand that if he sits he will receive the reward, but if his butt is gently pushed towards the floor he will eventually sit. As a result he will learn that if he sits he will get the reward. Shaping is an extremely useful technique that speeds up the learning process. Therefore, the best and most effective way to condition your dog is to use negative punishment and positive reinforcement combined using the shaping technique, for the simple reason that these options do not cause harm or high level of stress for the animal while others do. The next method to be introduced is observational learning,meaning dogs can learn how to behave simply by observing their environment. “Dog training methods are traditionally based on individual learning (mainly operant conditioning). Yet dogs are adept at acquiring information socially and are able to imitate humans.” (Fugazza & Miklosi, 2015, p. 146) The Do as I do method for dog training has recently been introduced into dog training and researchers Claudia Fugazza and Adam Miklosi have done and experimented to compare both methods, Do as I do and modeling to see the different responses the dogs would have. They concluded that the "do as I do" method is more efficient for teaching dogs complex tasks by bringing thirty-eight owners and pets together and having them perform two tasks: object-related and body movement. Their conclusion was that "this study clearly demonstrates that the use of social learning with the Do as I do method improves dogs' memory of trained actions and their verbal cues." (Fugazza & Miklosi, 2015, p.146) Also, as a real-life experience, I taught my dog, who was already one year old when I adopted him, how to potty train and obedience tricks. My dog's name is Mia and she is a smart and stubborn beagle. When she first came to my house, she had not been trained at all. Even though my boyfriend and I took her out 4 times a day, she still peed and pooped inside the house. Then, in the end, we decided to buy a speaker. At first I was hesitant because I thought she would suffer, but later I decided the best thing was to train her to potty outside. Once the carrier arrived, every time she peed or pooped on the carpet, we put her in the carrier as a negative punishment, taking away her freedom and leaving her there for hours. Within a month he improved significantly. Normally I would clean up 2 or 3 times after her, but nowadays she doesn't go potty in the house anymore. She learned very quickly that the consequence of peeing and pooping inside was the cage, so she didn't mess up the carpet because she didn't want to be punished. Another method used by us was positive reinforcement, to teach her the tricks of obedience and also to reinforce the right attitudes such as going potty outdoors. Mia didn't know how to do anything when she came to us. She had been neglected by some heartless person, so she probably didn't have anyone to teach her any tricks. We started with the basics: sit! Dogs in general have a tendency to automatically sit when they want something, but what they need to learn is to sit whenever the owner tells them to sit, not just when they want to. Therefore, I started telling her to sit, and if she did it correctly, I would reward her with a treat. over time, the number of treats decreased because she was conditioned to sit down every time she heard the word. After the session, he learned to go down, roll over, jump and stand up. Believe it or not, the hardest trick to teach was the shaking. For some reason, Mia didn't understand this command. I tried to teach him for days, and finally one day I looked on a website on how to teach a dog to tremble, and the method was simple: I put the treat between my fingers, preventing him from taking it. and when she put her paw on my hand with the intention of digging it up, I gave her a treat. It was like magic! He understood it by the fifth or sixth time. After some treat training, I noticed that she was already conditioned to give me her paw every time I reached out to her. Today she fusses and high fives very easily, even if I give her my feet and say "Hi five", she will put her paw on my feet. Finally, mine.