Care and Training.

For many dog lovers, their four-legges pets are considered to be an extention of their family. As with all family menbers. they need love, attention and care. Care is a general word that covers everything from physical grooming and bathing to toys and playtime, from traveling with your dog to finding a good boarding kennel. Training is also necessary for dogs to be productive family members. Training may be in the form of simple housebreaking or learning to walk on a lead, training may also be more elaborate. In short, training involves everything relating to how a dog interacts with its family members, in particular, and society, in general.

Housebreaking.

If there is such a thing as a "trick" to housebreaking a dog, it would have to be always applying the same system, being patient and understanding and diligent. This can be a very trying period in a puppy's life for both owner and the young pup, who's trying its best to pleaseThere are two methods of housbreaking. One is accomplised directly and the other uses paper training as an intermediate stage. I will desdribe the first one.

To housebreak a dog directly. follow a simple set of rules. The puppy must be allowed frecquent access to the outdoors, and given a chance to urinate and defecate befour being brought back inside, Young puppies need to eliminate often, so be sure to go outside frequently in the early days - right after feeding, sleeping and playing. You must keep a close eye on it, supervise its activeties at all time. Remember a correction is useful only if you catch the dog in its act. Never drag the puppy over to a soiled and then scold it. Dogs are simply not able to understand what you are trying to teach them in that situation. They will not associate the correction with the housbreaking accident, the only thing you acive is to break your good conection to your puppy. If you cannot catch the puppy in its act, simply clean the mess and be patient with your dog.

Basic Obedience; Training

You can't live properly with an amstaff unless it's trained. It's that simple, and it realy doesn't matter wether your amstaff is a puppy or a full developed staff, a staff is a working dog and should be trained. An untrained staff is an invitation to disaster. A staff that won't come when you  call is always in danger.

You can't blame the dog either. If you dont train your amstaff, you are at fault. No one else. If fact, your not prepared to properly train your amstaff, you probably shouldn't get one in the first place.

Now the good news. Amstaffs are easilt trained. Despite the fact they train relative easily, however, you still have to do the job.

Rest assured that training does not strip a dog of natural instincts or joie de vivre. After all, these are the things that attracts anstaffs people in the first place. We want you to celebrate the amstaffs spirit of happyness and working abilities, not abuse it.

What training does, however is structure the amstaffs responses, giving you a good companion. Training gives your staff that significantly enhances your muyual respect and friendship.

Every civilized dog should know at least five bacis commands; hell, sit, down, stay and come. These commands form the core of exercises required for a Companion Dog degree in an Obedience competition.Even if you don't take your dog beyond these beginning lessons, the are absolutely essential in making every dog a true companion.

Take your dog to obedince training to learn it, even if you as a owner already have learned it before, it is fun and it's great to meet other people in the same situation, and you get to socialies your puppies with other breeds at the same time. In Norway i can recomand Norwgian Rottweiler Klub or Oslo hundeskole. They are all very exelent and have trainers that are specialesed in training dogs in general. In Denmark i can recomand to call DKK for information were they have nerest obedience training in your comunity