What is the difference between classroom dog obedience and real-world dog obedience?
Yesterday, I was working with a student who has a service dog puppy in training. We were at a public location, for the first time. What seemed like a simple concept turned out to be harder than she expected. She made mistakes, so did her dog. That was a good thing. She was pretty tired and told me she didn’t realize how much more work it was taking a service dog in public compared to just walking her other dog.
Most dog training is done in a relatively sterile environment. Most dogs are taught a limited set of tasks (Sit, Down, Come, possibly Heel or no pulling, and usually Place onto a bed or cot). The dog graduates and the lessons are over.
First problem here… all skills are perishable. Training is never over. If that class is the last class that dog has, and the owner doesn’t maintain those skills, the dog gets sloppier over time, gets in more trouble over time, and one day an accident can happen that no one can recover from. If the owner participated in the training, same thing.
I have done Tune Up’s with past students and their dogs. I find that after as little as 6 months to a year, the precision of what was taught has deteriorated and both the dog and owner need a refresher. Dogs forget. People forget.
That might be OK for many pets. The dog is still mostly obedient, and the owner is mostly doing things right. Mostly. But that is the real risk to both.
Fast forward to a service dog. Service dogs are allowed into non-permissive environments that were never set up to accommodate dogs. The risks are higher for both the dog and the owner. What might be OK in a pet friendly environment often isn’t going to OK in an environment that didn’t have pets in mind: shopping malls, airplanes, offices, busses, stadiums, churches, where you work, etc. The demands are higher for training, for the dog, and for the owner. Someone can get hurt if the work isn’t practiced to a higher standard.
This is like the difference between training a dog at a pet store, dog club, or having someone else train your dog in a board and train program, and then having that same dog perform at a high level in a competition: Agility, Rally, Schutzhund, Hunting Trials in a busy public venue.
I think many people expect too much of their dogs without training their dogs and maintaining that training for the life of their dog. They also don’t appreciate that the number of fundamental skills that should be taught, and don’t realize that it is a good idea to have a third party (a good trainer) observe them periodically in a busy public environment to see if everything is still working as intended. Can the owner and dog put it all together in the intended complex environments that are planned?
I remember a similar situation I experienced as a kid. I was in middle school, in a school gymnasium, doing a clarinet solo with a piano accompaniment. I hadn’t performed in front of a judge like that before. Halfway through my solo, my brain went blank, and I forgot everything. I stopped playing and didn’t know what to do. Fortunately, the piano player did a few prompts with the song, I recalled the music and finished the solo. I froze because I hadn’t been prepared for that situation. I had practiced my music to perfection. It all sounded perfectly in the band room at my school. But here, all it took was to up the level of distraction, and the pressure of being watched, and my brain went blank.
This happens with dogs and their owners in the real world. I’ve seen people freeze and not know what to do when their dogs ran off, or got in a dog fight, or bit someone, or got spooked by some stimulus. They weren’t prepared and neither were their dogs. Simple dog training in a classroom, or by sending the dog off for someone else to do the work, gives them a false sense of security that all is complete. It isn’t.
Is this the situation you face with your dog? If so, then there is more work to be done.