Did You Know That Your Dog Can Imitate You? Try These Tips When Training Your Pup

At Citizen Canine, we are dog lovers, and we are devoted to making your dogs stay at our facilities safe, happy and as much fun as possible. If you are seeking overnight boarding, daycare or dog training in Alameda and surrounding areas, our staff of dog professionals can provide your dog with a comfortable and happy experience.

Our dog training services include basic training, tricks, advanced tricks and agility training. Our method is to reward good behavior and ignore poor behavior. We get to know each dog and his or her personality, as this helps us in individualized training.

If you’re interested in trying to teach your own dog some new tricks, a recent study reveals a surprising fact that may help: Dogs are capable of imitating people. Humans and apes have declarative memory, which is basically long-term memory, or the ability to remember things that happened up to 10 minutes earlier. According to studies, it turns out that dogs have declarative memory too. Virginia Morell of The Huffington Post reports that scientists and dog trainers have known since 2006 that dogs can imitate human behavior, when the “Do as I Do” method was employed to see if dogs could imitate humans the way that chimpanzees were taught to in the 1950s. But it wasn’t until 2009 that a training method was developed that taught dogs to remember a human action and imitate it only when they were commanded to, sometimes several minutes later. This is called deferred imitation, and some scientists believe that if dogs can do it, it’s likely that other animals can as well. For now, deferred imitation could be used to teach dogs how to bring in the mail or retrieve other things for their owners.

Citizen Canine in Oakland provides dog training in Alameda and the Bay Area, as well as boarding services and adventure hikes.