3 Awesome Ways to Train Pit Bulls to Become Guard Dogs

1. Socialization

This process involves familiarizing your pit bull with strange people and animals. Of course, you don’t want to your dog to attack your friends when they come visiting you or your cat if you have got one. So, it’s necessary to socialize it as a way of making it tolerant to a select few people. As part of the socialization process, take your pit bull out on long walks into the neighborhood and to other places. This will familiarize it with strange noises such as traffic noise and other noises in the neighborhood. Socialization with pit bulls should start between 7 – 12 weeks of age. They learn faster at this age and they have the best retention for whatever they are taught.
2. Obedience training
Your pit bull may be familiar with you, your family, and your friends. In fact, it may be familiar with your other pets. But this alone won’t make it a good guard. You will need to teach your dog some basic obedience. Pit bulls, when properly trained are very obedient. So, you won’t have to repeat the this training over again.
The obedience training involves teaching your dog what to do whenever you give a command, either verbally or by gesture. It involves interpreting what each command means and how your dog should respond to it. To make your dog learn faster and boost its confidence and loyalty to you, reward it with treats during the obedience training session. Each time it responds well to your command, show it that you are pleased by giving it cookies, toys, or some other reward. This has two benefits:
Your dog will learn to accept commands from you alone and ignore commands from anyone other than you. (This is important because a guard dog will be literally useless if it obeys commands by an intruder.)
Your dog will learn not to accept treats from anyone other than you. So, intruders won’t have their way by simply throwing some cookies at your pit bull, as a distraction tactic.
Through proper obedience training, your pit bull will learn to attack on your command and ignore commands and distractive treats from intruders.
3. Setting the limits
Pit bulls can be really pushy and dominant, and if you are too meek, your dog can become overly willful. So, it is important that you train your dog not to become an alpha dog. You must train your dog with a firm hand in order to keep it absolutely under your control.