How do you assess your dog’s level of training?
Here’s how I do it.
- Can you predict what your dog will reliably do when you communicate for them to perform trained tasks in various public contexts?
- What is the level of difficulty that we are testing?
Thus, if I see a dog that won’t respond to any communication, then the dog is completely untrained.
If the dog must be lured with a visible treat, then it is just a beginner.
If the dog can work without a visible lure, in a controlled setting, then that is an advanced beginner. (This is not nearly enough to trust your dog in a difficult real-world situation.)
And so on…
I see lots of beginning dogs in social media advertising. Anyone, even a newbie, can get any aged dog to spin around if they hold a tasty treat in their fingertips. That level of work isn’t going to save your dog, at that juncture, in any emergency. Same with these videos I see of dogs walking “off leash” in public, right beside the handler who has an electric collar on the dog and the remote transmitter in their hand. You can do that with most dogs in 2 weeks. That doesn’t indicate a well-trained dog. The dog is following along. That isn’t the same as having a sufficient level of training to do actual tasks in a real-world situation. That is still beginning work. I have seen dogs run off, even with e-collars on, because the training wasn’t complete.
Here’s another thought. Let’s say you are amazed by what you see in some advertisement. Look at the age of the dog being demonstrated. If it is not yet an adult, it isn’t completely trained. You are being presented a “picture” of a well-trained dog, but that isn’t yet a well-trained dog even if all that was done is 100% correct. (That’s why most of these videos are with puppies and young trainers trying to get their online businesses thriving.) What do I mean by that? Dogs generally don’t do real world work until they are at least 2 years old, minimum, of age: guide dogs, search and rescue dogs, police dogs, military dogs, competition obedience dogs, field trial dogs, detection dogs, service dogs, and such. There is a reason why most professional and sport organizations won’t let dogs compete or do work until they are at least 18 to 24 months of age. They don’t want people forcing young dogs to do work before they are ready. Humans are competitive, and if there weren’t some rules, then they would try and show off with very young dogs, and harm those dogs just to get a title or ribbon.
Here’s what I want to hear from my students if they encounter an emergency: This situation happened, I communicated to my dog, my dog obeyed, and I saved my dog’s life because of our training. (Not that I want you to put your dog in an emergency. But it is a real world “test” of whether the training was valid and useful.)
Here’s a real-world example. I have a past student with a mixed bred dog. He regularly took his dog to a neighborhood park where people let their dogs play off leash. One day, a dog fight broke out among 2 other dogs. His dog started running over there. While his dog was in a full run, he commanded his dog to Down. The dog immediately dropped and stayed there. He went over, put a leash on his dog, and left the park. That is a real world, well trained, properly managed and supervised, pet dog. That wasn’t the parlor tricks you see of dogs swirling around someone’s leg for a hot dog or a dog walking alongside someone while wearing an e-collar for a quick demonstration. Can the dog and handler deal with a real-world situation, reliably? And have they prepared for emergencies, and can they predict that it will turn out OK before an emergency?
Communication => Correct Action => Happy Ending
Plan accordingly.