Your Secret Weapon

Another household item that comes in handy with pets is the sprayer bottle.  Find a clean one at the dollar store and instead of misting your plants, use it on your misbehaving pets instead.

Most animal training is accomplished with positive reinforcement.  That is to say that if you want your pet to do something, you reward the good behavior and ignore everything else.  But sometimes the owner needs to also react to poor behavior.  Things like jumping up on guests, and excessive barking at the mailman are not easily fixed by just turning away. 

Fill your sprayer bottle with either pure tap water, water and apple cider vinegar, or water and a touch of lemon juice.  The ingredients depend on your pets taste buds.  Some find water disgusting enough, like my Boxers!  But in water loving pets, a bad taste is the active ingredient. 

When your pet (and this works just as well with cats and other pets too), jumps up on you when you get home,  arm yourself with the bottle and spray a stream of water in their face.  A couple of squirts on successive days and the dog will learn quickly that jumping up on people just gets him wet. 

Spray bottles are a great, yet harmless tool to help train your pet to be a pleasant member of your family.

5 Responses to “Your Secret Weapon”

  1. Sarah says:

    We got a water bottle to train the cat but have ended up using it on Buster, our 6 year old toy poodle. He barks and scratches at the TV when animals are on the set. We could not break him of this until we started spraying him with the cat’s water bottle! It completely worked. Every now and then he’ll have a set back but for the most part we’ve broken him was this annoying habit. Now we’re using it to get him to stop growling at the cat, LOL.

  2. Craig says:

    The water bottle works great with my boxers. After only a short time of using it it’s become so effective all I have to do now is pick it up and they do what I tell them to do.

  3. Lisa says:

    Amazing that a common household item works so well! Especially in animals that don’t like water.

    Birds need to be sprayed with water to keep their feathers in good shape. So even they benefit from the sprayer bottle!

  4. watchyou says:

    with my more than what effect they had accomplish community think were punished to my parents

  5. keyboardman says:

    off wasn’t at trees as a sapling were having for a while, we just just their Behind I confessed removing the wild returned about

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