Realistic Expectations

Older dogs have some pretty ingrained habits for anxiety and reactivity as they have been practicing these poor choices for many many years. But even with a lifetime of anxious and reactive choices under her tiny belt, a dog can still learn how to make calm and polite choices instead when helped by her handler using our communication training approach! In this video, we’ll see a great example of this as a very polite Hope is heeling by all kinds of her former triggers without reacting.

One of the topics that I always chat about with all of my clients is having realistic expectations for their dog (and themselves!) after training and also about the amount of work that’s involved to maintain the dogs training. We can always make tremendous progress with any dog’s behaviour and mindset in training but it takes continued work at home after training to maintain this progress. Our goal for a dog is never to turn them into a ‘perfect obedient outgoing golden retriever’ (that’s completely unrealistic for the majority of struggling dogs) but instead to help each individual to become and maintain the best version of who they are and then teach the dogs owners how to apply the training approach to maintain the results longterm.