Obedience – Not Listening – Unreliable

When someone tells us their dog “doesn’t listen,” that can mean a hundred different things.

Maybe your dog knows Sit and Down perfectly in the house but seems to forget both the second you walk outside.

Maybe they Come when called — unless there’s something better to do.

Maybe they jump on guests, won’t stay in Place, drag you toward something they want, ignore Leave It, or seem to listen to one person in the house much better than another.

Or maybe you have a pretty good dog and simply want better communication and more reliable obedience.

Whatever brought you to us, we’re not going to assume your dog needs the exact same obedience program as every other dog.

First, We Figure Out What You Actually Need

Before deciding what we’re going to teach, we want to know:

What does your dog already know?

What don’t they know?

What do you want your dog to know?

And just as importantly:

How does your dog fit into your everyday life?

A dog living with a family in a busy neighborhood may need a different set of priorities than a dog living with one person in a quiet home.

Someone who wants to take their dog everywhere may need a different level of obedience than someone whose biggest goal is simply having a well-mannered dog around the house and neighborhood.

There are certainly commands and skills that are useful for most dogs.

But we don’t believe every dog and every owner automatically need the exact same training program.

We want to train the dog that’s actually standing in front of us for the life they’re actually going to live.

What Does Your Dog Need to Know?

That’s something we’ll decide together.

Depending on your dog and your lifestyle, that might include things like:

Sit

Down

Place

Come/Recall

Loose-leash walking or Heel

Leave It

Waiting at doors

Staying in a behavior until released

Proper manners around guests

Reliable responses around distractions

Some of those may be extremely important for your dog.

But a senior dog who doesn’t play tug or fetch may not need an Out command.

There isn’t much value in spending significant training time perfecting something you’ll almost never use while ignoring a behavior that would make your life with your dog dramatically easier every single day.

Our goal is to identify the obedience that will allow your dog to live their best life within your lifestyle and design the training around those priorities.

Then We Find the Holes

If your dog already has some obedience, we don’t necessarily need to start over.

We need to figure out where things begin to fall apart.

Does your dog truly understand the cue, or have they learned to rely on your body language, a treat in your hand, or something else happening at the same time?

Do they only understand the behavior in certain environments, meaning it hasn’t been completely generalized yet?

Do they understand duration — how long they’re expected to maintain the behavior?

Does everything disappear when we add distance or distractions?

Do they understand their release marker and know exactly when the job is finished?

Have they learned that commands can be ignored or that you’ll repeat yourself several times?

Does their drive for whatever is happening around them become stronger than their ability to maintain impulse control?

Can the trainer get the behavior, but the owner can’t?

Those answers tell us a lot about what needs to happen next.

Sometimes we’re teaching something new.

Sometimes we’re cleaning up something the dog already partially understands.

Sometimes we’re changing a learned behavior that has unintentionally been practiced and reinforced for a long time.

And sometimes we’re simply closing the gaps between:

“My dog knows it.”

and

“My dog reliably does it.”

We Build Clear Communication

Before expecting reliability, we want to make sure your dog understands the system.

What does the cue mean?

How does your dog know they got it right?

When are they expected to continue?

How do they know they’re finished?

What happens when they make the wrong choice?

We may use markers to make those answers extremely clear.

A terminal marker, such as Yes, can tell your dog they got it right and the behavior is finished.

A duration marker, such as Good, can tell them they’re correct and should keep doing what they’re doing.

And a release marker, such as Free, Break, or Okay, can clearly tell them when they’re finished maintaining a behavior.

Depending on the dog and what we’re teaching, we may also use food, praise, play, leash pressure, different training tools, reinforcement, and appropriate corrections.

When teaching something new, techniques such as luring or shaping may help your dog understand what we’re asking before we begin expecting reliability.

The specific approach can change from dog to dog.

The goal doesn’t:

Make the information as clear and black and white as possible.

We want your dog to understand both what we want them to do and what we want them not to do.

Knowing It Is Only the Beginning

Teaching the basic behavior is usually the easier part.

Making it useful in everyday life takes more work.

Once your dog understands what we’re asking, we begin proofing that behavior.

That means gradually changing the picture.

We increase duration.

We increase distance.

We introduce distractions.

We change environments.

We practice around the things your dog actually encounters.

And through quality reps, your dog begins to understand that the same rules apply even when the picture around them changes.

That’s generalization.

A Come in your living room is a great place to start.

But if you need Come when your dog sees a squirrel, another dog, or something else they desperately want, that’s eventually the version we need to train.

Sometimes that also means beginning at an appropriate working distance from a distraction and gradually progressing as your dog becomes more capable of thinking and responding around it.

We’re not particularly interested in whether your dog can perform beautiful obedience while standing next to us during a training session.

We’re interested in whether you can get that same response when we’re not there and real life is happening around you.

That’s the point.

We Don’t Expect Everything at Once

Training needs to progress at a level the dog can reasonably understand.

If your dog just learned Place, we’re not immediately going to expect them to hold it for an hour while twelve people walk through your front door.

We build toward it.

As your dog becomes successful, we gradually increase duration, distance, distractions, and difficulty.

We want to challenge your dog without constantly putting them into situations where they’re incapable of succeeding.

For some dogs, building confidence and resilience may be an important part of that process too.

And if something falls apart, we want to know why.

Maybe we moved too quickly.

Maybe the distraction was too difficult.

Maybe the dog was approaching or over their threshold and wasn’t in a good position to learn.

Maybe the dog didn’t understand the behavior as well as we thought.

Maybe our communication wasn’t clear.

Training gives us information.

We use that information to adapt the plan rather than blindly following the same protocol for every dog.

Eventually, This Has to Work Without Us

This part matters.

We’ll teach your dog what to do, and then show you what to do, how to do it, and why you’re doing it.

But ultimately, you live with your dog.

If Come means Come during our training sessions but means “come whenever you get around to it” the other days of the week, your dog is going to figure that out pretty quickly.

Dogs are very good at discovering gray areas.

They’re also very good at recognizing patterns. Both consistency and inconsistency teach your dog something.

Clear, black-and-white expectations and following through are the owner’s part of the training.

The more consistently you carry the training into everyday life, the more reliable your dog’s obedience can become.

As communication becomes clearer and more predictable, you’re not only building obedience. You’re also building trust and reliability between you and your dog.

What Are We Really Trying to Accomplish?

We’re not trying to turn every family dog into an obedience competition dog.

And we’re not interested in teaching commands just so we can say your dog knows them.

We want obedience that has a purpose.

A Place command that allows you to answer the door without chaos.

A Down that helps your dog settle while you’re having dinner somewhere.

A Leave It that prevents them from grabbing something dangerous.

A Heel or loose-leash walk that makes taking your dog somewhere enjoyable.

A Come that you can increasingly depend on when it matters.

And enough impulse control, confidence, and communication that your dog can participate in more of your life instead of constantly being managed or left behind.

Good obedience should give your dog more freedom, not less.

The better your dog understands what is expected of them — and the more reliably you can communicate with each other — the easier it becomes to include them in things today you might have not even considered