Know what you mean, say what you mean, mean what you say

“It’s me, I know it is.” I hear this lament frequently during private lessons, and I always smile and nod. Yes, problems with dog training invariably result from owner miscues, poor timing, and inattentiveness. But if this is you, you’ve got plenty of company. Good dog trainers aren’t born, they’re developed - like great scientists or artists or business execs, they’ve spent countless hours engrossed in their subject.

If you know what you want from your dog, you’ll get it. Success is as much about attitude as it is about technique, although flaws in either will sully the outcome. Communicating with your dog is so crucial to achieving any training goal that it bears repeating (and repeating). Grossly oversimplified, if you know what you expect from your dog, your dog will know it. No, it’s not a matter of aiming intense mental “vibes” towards your dog, or creating a “happy environment” so he’ll “want to" please you. It’s a matter of knowing what you expect, and being a leader. Dogs discern hierarchy, and if you don’t occupy the top tier, your dog will know and will behave accordingly. When a person tells me they’re not afraid of my dogs but my dogs tell me otherwise, I believe the dogs. Dogs don’t lie. People do, and they can fool themselves into believing their circumlocutions are truth.

My students usually don’t realize they’re deceiving themselves. When Student A comes for a lesson with Zeus, her love for him is obvious. His disrespect for her is even more obvious. He’s seven months old, puffed up with his own high opinion of himself which his adoring family’s doting attention reinforces, and exacerbated by lack of clear boundaries. When he behaves rudely (every two minutes or so) Student A engages in a conversation with him (“Mommy’s gonna hafta get after you, you bold boy you. Why won’t you listen to Mommy?”), which he attends to not at all unless she waves a cookie, at which point he treats her like a vending machine. She thinks she wants an attentive, compliant dog, but her body language and behavior says otherwise; so, Zeus gives her what she asks of him, which is a spoiled child-surrogate.

What we want and what we think we want are often vastly different. We want our dogs to know what they should do when we really haven’t decided for ourselves what a “good dog” acts like.

When Student B's dog Kitty jumped up on me, I asked if she’s allowed; Student B said, “Well, sometimes.” Sometimes doesn’t cut it for dogs. If you allow it, fine. If you don’t, don’t. Not once, not sometimes. Clarity, consistency, correction, praise - the vocabulary of training.