The DEV Dog Blog

There are sooooo many cool tricks, commands, sports, and more to train your dog, but before you get into any of that, we always recommend teaching what we in dog trainer land call Markers. 

Markers are short sounds that we use to give our dogs feedback on their decisions and behaviors. 

We call our Marker system: The Communication! Partially because we wanted to get a little fancy and fun with it! Partially because we feel that it is a better way to express the purpose of using these sounds. Once the pup and the human understand them well, we can use them to effectively “have a conversation” with our pupper to guide them in the right direction. That way instead of having to use commands all the time to keep our pups safe and to mind their manners, we can instead just tell them “Hey, that’s great, do that more often” or “Nope, don’t do that”. We can create strong boundaries, which ultimately allows more freedom since our dogs know what they can do and what they can’t. 

The Communicat...

 Short answer = right away! 

Every moment that you are with your dog, you are training your dog. So! It is important that once you get done reading this article you start to make changes to improve your and your dog’s life. Regardless of whether you have a brand new puppy, a bouncy adolescent who can’t seem to keep themselves together, or a dog with behavioral issues, now is the time to start training! 

Your dog’s age and maturity level is a huge factor in your training focus: 

With young puppies, especially under 4 months, it’s important to keep training super easy and fun. Starting marker training (particularly teaching Yes), name recognition games, crate games, engagement games, recall, and simply experiencing the world are super important. Keep your play and training sessions short. Like 5-10 minutes short. You’ll also want to make sure your puppy is getting plenty of quality rest in between your sessions! Puppies need up to 20 hours of sleep every day! Cranky puppies are no fun...

There are a myriad of reasons why training your dog is so important, but they really boil down to three biggies: safety, harmony, and fun 

First up: Safety.

Untrained, misbehaving dogs can cause great harm without even realizing it. There was an article by PBS that came out the other day stating “From 2001 to 2020, the estimated number of adults seen at emergency departments for dog-walking injuries increased significantly, from 7,300 to 32,300 a year”. That’s just taking your dog for a walk! When dogs have a solid foundation of training, they will be less likely to follow their impulses and instead follow their owner’s guidance when out in the world. Which means less likelihood of the dog pulling their owner over causing harm. 

Now for the more damaging stats. In 2023, there were 4.5 million dog bites recorded in the US according to the CDC. Fatalities from dog bites and attacks have also been on the rise since 2018. The largest percentage of victims fell into the 0-2 year old a...