It’s essential for Chihuahua parents to know certain basic commands and circumstances that determines your relationship with your Chihuahua. This can go a long way in training them effectively.
Before you begin training your Chihuahua, it is absolutely essential that you build a loving bond with them. This is important as it helps you to understand their needs and instincts. It also allows your Chihuahua to have complete trust in you.
How To Bond With Your Chihuahua
Building a bond with your Chihuahua is the first and the most crucial step involved in training them successfully. As soon as you bring your Chihuahua home, you must first try to develop a caring and loving relationship with them in order to win their trust and confidence.
When Chihuahuas are secure in the knowledge that they belong to the family, they are more likely to respond better to their owners’ training commands. Just like with any relationship, there must be mutual trust and respect between you and your Chihuahua.
Trust takes time to develop and respect comes from defining boundaries and treating any breach of those boundaries with firmness and fairness.
Without enforceable limitations, respect can’t be developed. And when there is no respect, building a bond with your Chihuahua is almost impossible.
4 Golden Rules To Building A Relationship With Your Chihuahua:
- Spend quality time together;
- Take them out in the world and experience life together;
- Establish and promote a level of mutual respect; and
- Develop a way of communicating to understand each other’s needs.
Building a bond with your Chihuahua will not only help you manage them better, but will also make your Chihuahua calm, quiet and an extremely well-adjusted pet.
Love Your Chihuahua and They Will Love You Back
Once you’re successful in building a bond with your Chihuahua, you can rest assured that training them and teaching them new and clever tricks will be a cakewalk.
How Your Chihuahua Learns…
Your Chihuahua’s learning period can be divided into five phases:
1. The Teaching Phase – This is the phase where you must physically demonstrate to your Chihuahua exactly what you want them to do.
2. The Practicing Phase – Practice makes Perfect. Once a lesson is learnt, practice with your Chihuahua what you have just taught them.
3. The Generalizing Phase – Here you must continue practicing with your Chihuahua in different locations and in an environment with a few distractions. You can take your Chihuahua out for a walk, or to a nearby park and command them to practice whatever you’ve taught them.
Practicing the learned lessons in multiple locations and in the presence of small distractions will help them learn and retain lessons better.
4. The Testing Phase – Once you’re sure that your Chihuahua has achieved almost 90% success… they respond correctly almost every time you give a command, you must start testing their accuracy in newer locations with a lot of distractions.
Example: Take them to the local shopping mall and ask them to obey your command. They may not come up with the correct response the very first time you do this, but you must not lose hope.
The idea is to test your Chihuahua to see how they respond in an environment which is new to them. Set-up a situation where you are in control of the environment and your Chihuahua.
There are only 2 possibilities:
- Your Chihuahua succeeds! (Trumpets please!)
- In case your Chihuahua fails, re-examine the situation. Review and/or change your training. Then try testing again.
Keep on testing until they succeed. Follow the rule of the 3 P’s – Patience, Persistence, Praise. This also applies to learning disciplinary behaviors like teaching your Chihuahua to stop barking and potty training your Chihuahua.
5. The Internalizing Phase – Finally, comes the extremely rewarding phase, where your Chihuahua does everything they are taught to do even without your commands.
Remember:
- Never scold your Chihuahua if they fail. It’s not their fault. You have failed as a trainer!
- You must be patient and persistent for your efforts to show rewards.
- Appreciate and love your Chihuahua when they do it right! A little encouragement will work wonders for your Chihuahua.
- Chihuahua Training is easy when you do it right.
