Dog training: What is cross contextualization?

There are countless terms that you will have to become proficient at in the course of training your dog. This will assist you, not only to understand your dog but it will also assist you make some measure of success. One of such terms you must acquaint yourself with is cross contextualization. Remember, your dog is a social animal and is likely to be in numerous places where you expect it to respond to your commands easily and quickly.

What is cross contextualization? It simply refers to the process of retraining your dog using the same commands in another setting or context. In the beginning, you started training your dog at home in the backyard or in the park. This made your dog to respond to your commands in that particular area or spot. But when you become confident of the dog’s ability to respond fast to your commands, you thought that it would repeat the same anywhere you take it.

For instance, you may be taken aback when you take your dog to a public park and command it to sit but it could not respond. The setback is that it has become accustomed to the training at home and could not come to grasp with the new environment. In other words, your dog has not acclimatized to the new setting and therefore need you to do some retraining for it to respond to your instructions.

Therefore, as a dog owner you know that your dog can’t be restrained to a particular place. So, to avoid confusing your dog, it is highly essential for you to retrain it in any new area or location you take it to. It is best to list the places you will be visiting along with the dog and build your training sessions around those places or locations.

Be well-advised that retraining your dog is not as difficult as when you were training it the first time. In cross contextualization, all you have to do is get the dog accustomed to the new place. In other words, let it get used to the new place in order to respond to your commands. Additionally, the length of time of training in the new place is frequently shorter than initial training. Now that you are aware of what cross contextualization means, it is no longer acceptable yelling at your dog when you take it to a new environment that is totally different from where you trained it to obey you. All you have to do is patiently train it in the setting you have brought it.