Be Fair To Your Dog

If you want to be able to take your dog places and have them behave politely, you have to train for it. Far too often I see people say “but he knows sit/down/stay (insert behaviour here), why won’t he do it at X, Y, Z place when he knows it?”, and then proceed to set high expectations without actually doing the ground work.

The ground working isn’t just teaching sit. The ground work is making sure the dog understands what sit actually means. The groundwork is then teaching that sit means sit in all environments, not just the living room or training hall. The ground work is expanding the training to different and more distracting areas incrementally. The ground work is building confidence and reliability in those more distracting areas over time. The ground work is being fair to your dog and not skipping steps, and not piling on more than they can handle at any given time. The ground work is NOT teaching sit in the training hall or living room, never practicing outside and then getting frustrated and wondering why they won’t sit when you think they know it, but the situation is too overwhelming/exciting for them to focus.

Be fair to your dog. Don’t expect good performance if you’ve never actually trained for it. Don’t expect excellence if you haven’t introduced and practiced training in different environments, with different scenarios, under different distractions.

Be fair to your dog. If you haven’t shown them how to do it under all circumstances don’t get mad if they blow you off, act like they don’t know, get anxious or give you the finger.

Be fair to your dog. Don’t expect what you yourself haven’t prepared for.

That is all.

Happy Wednesday.