If you have adopted an older dog only to learn it has some behavior problems, don’t worry-you can teach an old dog new tricks. It is a good idea to know something about a dog before you adopt it, but sometimes you just won’t know what you are in for. Adopting an older dog means he may come to you with some behavior issues. Common problems pet owners have with newly adopted older dogs, are aggression, barking too much or even soiling inside the house. Whatever the case may be, if you use the right techniques when training your new pet,  you will be able to help him to behave properly, learn his place within your family, become a great addition to your household.

When you first adopt an older dog, be sure to really check it out for any behavior issues. If your dog has any aggression problems-maybe he is aggressive towards other dogs, people, or over his food. You will need to pay immediate attention to correcting aggression problems, as these could lead to someone getting bitten.  Try to determine if he has any behavioral problems needing special attention and the level of his previous obedience training-if any at all. Try giving your new pet some basic obedience commands and see how he responds. If he doesn’t know the basic commands, you’ll know he hasn’t been given any training. If he responds fearfully to a command to come or sit, this may mean he was abused by a previous owner. Make sure he is totally house trained, too. Take a thorough look at his disposition and behavior so you can see where to begin training your older dog.

The best way to get started training an older dog is to follow the advice of the best  professional dog trainers, and use a step by step program that takes you from basic obedience training exercises right through more advanced training. This takes all the guess work out of how to train your older dog, and also will enable you to avoid making the same mistakes everyone always makes when trying to train their dog without a good system in place. All the best professional trainers emphasize using positive training techniques. Using positive reinforcement, you will give praise and rewards to your dog for correct behaviors, and teach him how you want him to behave. You will also learn how to communicate with your dog in a way that dogs understand. Knowing how to use your voice and your body language has a lot to do with training your dog effectively.

You will learn how to be your dog’s leader-the Alpha dog. Once you have earned his respect, confidence and trust as the Alpha dog, he will be eager to follow your leads. It is a dog’s essential nature to try to please the superior members of his “pack”-that’s you and your family.

The whole family needs to learn to be consistent with the training, to avoid any conflicting and confusing training. With the right training methods your older dog quickly learns his place within his new “pack”.By establishing yourself as the Alpha leader, you will good results with solving behavior problems your dog may have brought with him.

Training an older dog to be the best addition to your family that he can be will provide you with a pet that you can be comfortable with in any social situation. Since you adopted the older dog to be a new part of your family, don’t allow him to be anything other than a joy to have. Be sure you take the time to train your older new best friend  and have the best relationship with him you can have.

Come to think of it, training a God is not just converting your dog to simple following your instructions and commands. When you start training your dog for obedience and anti aggressive behavior you actually increase your interaction with your pet. In the course of training, your dog learns a few tricks, but at the same time you also get to learn a lot about your four legged companion.

There are numerous ways and means to train a dog, but one of the most effective dog training aids is an electronic clicker The essence of clicker training is that the dog is guided, not forced, into the desired behavior.

The clicker works on the principles of conditioning behavior and association of actions with sounds as experimented by Ivan Pavlov (a Russian Behavioral expert) long ago. He researched and established a relation between sounds and sight. He determined that even in the absence of the actual situation we can condition an intelligent animal such as a dog to react for a situation on hearing a sound even in the absence of the actual situation and associating sounds with events and required actions.

Pavlov had trained conditioned his dog for associating the sound of a bell with food and the dogs even started producing additional saliva when the bell rang and food was not provided as they had over a period of time associated the sound with food.

In the similar way you can train your dogs to act and behave in a required manner to the sound of a clicker. It takes a lot of patience, but is entirely non-confrontational. If you learn and understand clicker training you will not only be more effective in training dogs, but you will probably also improve your people handling skills.

Clicker in my opinion is one of the greatest dog training aids developed till now and suitable for dogs of all sizes and breeds.