4 Things That Need To Happen For Your Dog To Get Trained

If your dog would rather eat horse poop, take a nap, or chase it’s tail than sit and gaze at your face, you need to solve this problem before anything else. 

This is why we emphasize teaching dogs focus and attention first and foremost. 

Imagine you are standing still with your dog on a leash. You make a little sound with your mouth to get your dog to look at you. And when they return your gaze, you give them a treat.  That’s a great start. 

The bottom line is that you cannot train a dog that isn’t engaged with you. Engagement, attention, focus, whatever you like to call it, has to come first.  

And for that to happen, your dog needs to believe you are the opposite of boring. They need to believe you are amazing!

If you think your dog understands what sit means, try saying ‘sit’ with your eyes closed, or with your back to the dog, or while you talk to a friend, or sit on the floor, or walk away, or another dog comes past.  

These are all variations of ‘sit’.

Sit doesn’t mean, “sit if there’s nothing better to do”  And it doesn’t mean “sit, and then get up again immediately”

Yet most people fail to teach their dogs what SIT does actually mean. And then decide that the dog is stubborn or naughty when they disobey the cue.  

We now know that this causes a lot of confusion.

Modern training adds the cue when the behavior is established. So we say SIT as the dog sits. Associating a word with the correct action is a great way to learn a new language, and dogs learn fast when we do this. 

Always pair your cues with the action you want the dog to perform in the future. Not with a poorly rehearsed or incompletely understood behavior.

This article explains, in detail, how to do this. Game Based Dog Training 

That second rule: building the meaning of the cue in layers, is all about breaking training down into achievable levels and setting the dog up to win at each level, so that our cue (in this case SIT) continues to be always associated with the correct behavior.  That’s what the next section is about

#3 You must be able to define your training goals at each level

In order to teach your dog how to obey every cue you give in all kinds of different circumstances and under different conditions, you need to list all the common challenges to obedience that your dog is likely to come across and allocate each one to a level of difficulty.

Once you have defined those levels of difficulty, you need to set one or more goals that you want to achieve at each level.  For example, one goal might be: “I want my leashed dog to sit and give me eye contact for three seconds at the dog park”.

For more information on exactly how to do this, I suggest you read this: How To Make A Dog Training Plan    

Once you have defined those training levels all that remains is to work steadily through them. 

#4 You must master each level before moving on to the next

We’re all in a hurry!  I get that. It’s so tempting to push on to the next thing before we have properly mastered the one we are working on at the moment.  But with dog training each layer of understanding is balanced on the previous layer. And if we miss out a step, we risk making mistakes that come back to bite us later.  

So take your time. Train for a few minutes each day, that’s all it takes. 

And if necessary go back a few steps.  I do this ALL the time.  There’s no shame in taking your dog back to basics, no matter how well trained they were, when things start to get sloppy. 

This is one of the great benefits of modern dog training. 

You can always back up to where you were getting it right, and move forward again making sure that each level of understanding is securely in place before moving on to the next level.