The day my friend asked me to train his older black lab was the day the battle began. I told him, "Yeah man I can train any dog!" So I began with getting to the know the dog a bit. I noticed that the dog was very hard on listening and basically did whatever it wanted. Dolly (the black lab dog) had an  attitude like I had never seen before in my life.  I couldn't understand how a dog that was so well trained on "come" and being potty trained, mis-behaved so much with everything else.
    
     I tried to think of what to start with and I figured trying to teach Dolly to "sit." The whole process took me around 5 days, which I found very long for one of my average dogs. By the way, I don't consider myself to an expert trainer, but I do train a couple dogs here and there. My training basically spreads by word of mouth and that is it. So the sit was taught just like any other sit, of just sort of using treats to make the dog want to sit after physically showing her what sit actually was.

     Next, it was obvious that she needed to be taught not to bark whenever she WANTED something because it was driving her family insane. The fact that she barked very loudly whenever she wanted, was enough to drive anyone out of this world. This was tough for me to think of how to teach her to not do this. I basically tried to train her to stop while in the act . Once she started barking I would just yell over her and say, "No, Dolly!" It was that or telling her to "be quite." I'm not sure if that was the correct way of going about it, but the fact of the matter was it worked. Thank god dogs are so smart, or else my possible wrong method of training would not of worked.

     The occasional potty accidents in the basement while no one was home needed to end. I had no idea of going about this either. The only method I could think of was to drag her down there by the collar and show her what she did was wrong. And by doing this, I showed her by pointing her head at the poop and saying, "No." It was basically me showing her that what "she layed" on the floor was not alright. This worked as well. I was quite amazed by myself but not too amazed because I was unsure of what I was doing was the correct thing to do at all times.

     Dolly turned out to be a pretty well trained dog by the end of my training. I do not by all means proclaim to be a dog trainer, but what I do works for the dog. I just try to keep physical abuse out of training as much as possible and just use my head as to what would work the best for the dog to understand. This may sound dumb, but I put myself in the dogs shoes and wonder what it would take for me to learn what it was if I were a dog.