Its really common to discover that your dog can perform some behaviours in only some places, only when there are no dogs or people around, or for a particular person, or not when there is another dog around… why is this? Is this a training issue? Is your dog just ‘being naughty’?

Firstly, let me say that dogs aren’t ‘naughty’ – they don’t choose a behaviour knowing that you don’t like it. This is because they don’t make moral or ethical decisions like humans do.

Lets say you have spent some time teaching a recall, but on the beach you call your dog, he looks back and then runs off. What could this mean?

• Consideration 1 – it can be a training issue whereby the dog doesn’t fully grasp what the cue word you are using means. The test for this is to try at home, without distractions.  In this instance the beach could be far too distracting and so the dog would rather explore and they are not entirely sure what you want when you call them.
• Consideration 2 – if the dog can do this behaviour on cue at home, fluently and quickly, then it could be a case of needing to generalise the teaching. This means practicing in lots of other places – different rooms in the house, by the front door, in the garden, by the car, by the front gate… All again considering the level of distraction which will have an impact. In this instance, the dog may not have been taught that the recall cue works at the beach as well as at home.
• Consideration 3 – does this work for only 1 person in your family and not so well (or at all) for others? This can be where 1 person does the vast majority of the training and means your dog has learnt all the relevant tone of voice and body language of that 1 person and the reinforcement history that this game works with this person. If needs be, get others in the family to start some training game – it broadens their reinforcement history, its fun, helps the dog to expand their learning and builds confidence for humans and the dog.
• Consideration 4 – does it fail when the dog is watching intently, excited (or displaying other behaviour which evidences high emotional state)? If your dog is emotional (excited, anxious, alert to something etc) – their thinking brain stops and the fight/flight brain takes over – what you get is behaviour for the emotional response. This means that we need to tackle this in a different way – by teaching the dog to regulate their behaviour through the games we teach them and the slow and steady pace we work at
• Consideration 5 – you have (inadvertently) become the ‘fun police‘.  Your dog has learnt that when they respond, what they wanted to do is over. In this instance, the dog could have learnt that coming back to you means the lead is going on and you are going home. Since the dog is having a good time and would like to continue, they then choose to move away.

How does breed affect your training?

Breed can have a big impact on how you train your dog. However there are many other factors – the pregnancy of the mother dog, early raising experiences, genetics, own experiences and learning history. Learning influences are also carried forward through the generations.

Think about what your dog is bred to do – herding, retrieving, spotting prey, hunting down holes, search and hunting, lap dog etc. Whether your dog is bred to work directly alongside people (like collies and gundogs), or bred to work very independently and problem solve (like terriers) all plays a role. If you have had the same breed before, you will likely find that this dog is different – even litter siblings are different to each other!

Added to that, some individual dogs don’t feel the need to repeatedly practice the same thing, whereas others love the familiarity and safety of knowing what we want.  All this means we have to adapt how we teach, how much repetition we ask for and how much we mix it up.

Trying to use the same approach – repetition, complexity, distance – for every dog doesnt work. Building a customised approach has the greatest success!