How to Train 100% Reliability Part 1

My dog only listens to me sometimes. Why does my dog choose to ignore me sometimes but not other times?

When we ask ourselves this question we’re referring to our command reliability. How reliably does our dog carry out the commands we give it? 100% of the time? 70%? 50/50? Rarely?

There are two factors involved here that I want to cover with you today that determine your dog’s reliability score.

The first factor that affects our dog’s reliability is the number of eligible responses. The easiest way to explain this is to think of a multiple-choice question where you are asked to choose one of the choices. If I asked you, what color is the sky and offered you 3 choices: blue, green, or orange, the correct answer would be blue because you were told you could only select one choice and blue is the best choice.

Now imagine I asked you the same question, what color is the sky but this time I told you to choose all that apply. Now both answers “blue” and “orange” are correct because sometimes the sky is blue and sometimes the sky is orange.  

This is how owners often mistakenly train their dogs to respond to commands. Instead of training them to respond with only 1 choice, they are trained to respond by pulling from a multitude of options. The classic example of this happening is training the come command. 

We want our dogs to learn that there is only 1 clear choice when they hear us say “come” but instead, because of mistakes in our training, our dogs learn come can mean:

• Go to my owner
• Go follow a scent I just picked up
• Continue doing what I was doing and ignore my owner

So in the future, whenever we say “come” our dog chooses the response from above that it thinks best suits the situation at hand. Most of the time, that’s not going to be the first choice, go to my owner. 

If you want your dog to respond to your commands 100% reliably, then you need to train each command to result in only 1 outcome. Teach your dog that this is the ONLY way to respond to hearing your command and they will never even have the idea to do anything differently. 

How do you do this?

1. You make the 1 result happen every time you give your command
2. You don’t give the command unless you CAN make it happen

In other words, if you cannot control the outcome, don’t leave it up to fate. 

The second factor involved is our own reliability score. Training the quiet command is a lovely example of irregular reliability on the owner’s part. Our dog’s bark and sometimes it doesn’t really bother us right away so we let it go on for 30 seconds before we chime in and say “quiet.” Then later our dog barks while we’re on a call and we say “quiet” immediately. The next day we’re listening to music through headphones, our dog barks and we don’t say anything because it doesn’t bother us enough to put a stop to it. 

Our reliability is all over the place. There is no pattern for the dog to pick up on to learn when it has to be quiet. Is it after I bark 14 barks, or after 2 barks or can I bark however many times I want?

Our dogs learn from patterns and pick up on patterns that repeat themselves. If sometimes we carry out our commands when they are needed and other times we let things go, we are not being reliable. If we’re not being reliable for our dogs, it is then unfair of us to expect them to be reliable. 

You get the reliability out of your dog that you put in. 

You get the reliability out of your dog that you put in. 

Don’t command your dog to sit before you open the front door only 70% of the time before letting it go outside because then your dog will only sit for you 70% of the time you command it to. 

Don’t command your dog to get off the couch unless you can ensure it does by using its leash. The day you can’t ensure “off” means get down now, will be the day “off” means either get down now OR stay up here, you pick dog.

You get the reliability out of your dog that you put in.