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 follow out the commands we give it? 100% of the time? 70%? 50/50? Rarely?
There are 2 additional factors involved here that I want to cover with you today that determine your dog’s reliability score.
The first of these final 2 factors is the environment. Your dog will only respond reliably under the conditions in which it was trained. If you only ever trained your dog in your home, then your dog only has the ability to respond 100% reliably in your home.
It would be unfair of you to expect your dog to perform just as skillfully inside as outside. In this case, you would be putting unrealistic expectations on your dog.
So if we want our dogs to be 100% reliable at the park, we need to train at the park
If we want our dogs to be 100% reliable at our family’s house, we need to train at our family’s house
If we want our dogs to be 100% reliable around other dogs, we need to train around other dogs.
Your dog will only be successful in an environment if you have trained in that environment. This is because your dog does have the mental capacity to apply rules and constraints from one environment to another. Simply put, if you brought your dog to an entirely new place and commanded it to sit, if it could talk, it would probably ask you “Uhh do I have to sit when we’re here? And where am I supposed to be sitting? And for how long?”
We need to teach our dogs that the rules still apply in a variety of environments. Training the same command under a variety of conditions will actually help you achieve the 2nd factor: procedural learning.
Procedural learning refers to you or your dog’s ability to carry out an action without conscious thought regarding how to do it. You have actions that have fallen into your procedural learning category that you don’t realize BECAUSE you don’t have to think about doing them.
For instance, could you explain how you make a fist, or do you just do it? Another perfect example is driving on auto-pilot. Have you ever left home, arrived at your destination, and then couldn’t remember the middle part of your drive? You simply defaulted to operating using procedural learning when it comes to driving, so you could think about what you’re going to do when you get there, who you’re going to see, and sing the song that’s plating on the radio all at the same time.
The promised land of 100% reliability is procedural learning. When all of your commands fall into this section of the brain, your dog will simply carry out the command without consciously thinking it’s doing it.
The only way to achieve this is by repetition carried out in a variety of environments and under a variety of conditions so that no matter what is happening around your dog and no matter where your dog is, it has repeated the behavior enough times for it to become automatic.
How many repetitions do I need to do?
This is always the first question I get asked and although it largely depends on your dog, as every dog learns at their own pace, you should be aiming for 500-1,000 repetitions in each environment under a variety of conditions.
That doesn’t mean all in one day! Do 25-50 repetitions a day and you’ll reach 500 faster than you think!
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