Expect 100% from your dog

Something that I always try to really help our clients appreciate is that they need to hold their dogs very accountable for following commands, practicing polite behaviour, and maintaining a calm mindset and good attitude to the best of their ability every time. When dogs come to us for training, they often don’t have reliable obedience skills and a lot of them are struggling with mindset issues like reactivity, anxiety, over excitement, impulsive behaviour or true aggression. After training, the dog’s mindset and behaviour and obedience skills are so massively improved that it’s very easy for folks to accept less than their dogs ‘new’ best effort because a half effort is still so much better than what they had before training! I always caution people that as long as what you are asking from your dog is fair and reasonable and part of the dogs training, then it’s very important not to settle for less than your dogs very best effort but instead to help the dog follow through on exactly what you’ve asked of her. If we start accepting less from our dogs, allowing small misbehaviours or mindset slips and not making sure that the dog is following through on things 100% then pretty soon the dog will give less and less until you both are back struggling with all your old problems and issues. Our dogs assume that we endorse and support whatever we allow and don’t correct because from the dog’s perspective, the absence of ‘No’ means ‘Yes’. The absence of ‘do this’ means ‘do whatever you want’.
In this video, I caught a great moment with Onyx where she zoomed right past me during a recall to see her friend Charlie. Rather than allowing that indiscretion and endorsing less than Onyx’s best recall skills, I instead repeated the recall as I added remote collar communication to help her follow through on recalling to me and not to her handsome buddy 😉. In the second segment, you’ll see that Onyx does a perfect recall because I didn’t settle for less the previous time. Well done, beauty!