Have you trained your dog?

It is sad to think that most people who get a dog will never think about training it. They just buy a dog as a spur of the moment decision, or because their kids want it, and never think about how to train it properly. They do the usual things like take it to the vet for a checkup and to have vaccinations, and they will tell it off occasionally, but other than that they leave it to do what it wants. I think dogs are a lot like children, you need to draw lines for them so they know what they can and can't do, otherwise they will keep pushing the boundaries and become a real pain.

A common problem with untrained dogs is that they like to chew on things and destroy them. It is their own bed which is usually the first thing to be destroyed, they find that they can get their teeth into it and later in the day the bed is in bits all over the place. People think they can just buy a tougher dog bed to put an end to this behaviour, but all that does is make them focus on other things in the house like chairs and rugs etc.

A more worrying problem could be violence. If your dog is allowed to do what it wants, then when you try to take away that freedom then they could start to get aggressive towards you and start snarling or even try to bite you. That is something you definitely don't want to happen, especially if you have kids in the house.

Fighting is something you might experience with an untrained dog too. If your dog does not want to return to you when you let it off the lead, and tries like made to break free of the lead when it sees another dog, then it might escape and start a fight with a dog nearby, this means one of the two dogs might get badly hurt. So you could end up paying a chunk of cash to a vet even if your dog comes out unscathed, if your dog was the one to start the right.