When I brought Mandy home after the rescue, he was ecstatic. But at the end of the day, the only thought running through my mind was that I had to figure out how to train a German Shepherd.
Mandy was knocking me down, running around and basically dominating our house. I knew I had to do something fast, but the truth is that when we decided to adopt her, I had never thought about how to train a German Shepherd.
Looking around, I found a lot of information on how to train a German Shepherd, some of which helped, but many only made things worse. One of the biggest pieces of misinformation I came across was that you should always reward your dog with a treat.
When you’re just beginning to figure out how to train a German Shepherd, it seems to make sense to give your dog a treat when he listens. After all, she did what she was supposed to do, so you should reward her, right? And besides, those goodies made her so happy.
Your goal on why and how to train a German Shepherd is to make your dog not only listen to you, but want to listen to you. If he always receives a gift for doing what you tell him, he is not listening because he wants to please you, but because he wants what you are going to give him for it.