How long will it take to train my dog?

I’m often asked how long does my dog have to come to training?

Or

How long does it take to train my dog?

There is no honest answer to either of these questions.

My usual answer to this is “it depends”

It depends on your dogs age,

It depends on what breed your dog is,

It depends on how much training you do with your dog,

It depends on what you want to teach your dog,

It depends on how many people live in the house with the dog,

It depends on whether your dog has any behaviour issues.

It depends on a lot of things.

As you can see there is no straight forward answer to these questions.

Taking off my trainers hat here, my own personal opinion is that you teach your dog some core things, to walk on a lead without pulling, to come when called, to drop while running and to stay and distance hand signals so if you dog is across the road you don’t want to recall your dog you want to drop it where it is and go and get...

If a trainer says to you that they can FIX your dogs issues in one lesson, or in a few days, RUN.

No behaviour can be FIXED.

To change a dogs behaviour you have to change the dogs mindset, this cannot be done quickly.

If can appear that the dogs behaviour has been changed during or just after one session but this would not be the case.

The dog would have learned to do that behaviour for example, pull on the lead, this behaviour has developed because the dog has been allowed to pull on the lead and gets rewarded when it gets to where it wants to go by pulling.

Once the dog learns that not pulling on the lead brings benefits, for example, pats, praise and treats or playing, they will learn that not pulling gets them the good things.

The dog did not learn to pull in one session, they will not learn not to pull in one session either.   It might appear they have but they haven’t. 

Ask the trainer how they train the dogs. 

Have a look at their Facebook page and...

The year that wasn't.

Wow what a year we have had, hopefully it wont be too long and things will be back to normal.

But in the mean time I've been putting the time to good use.  Well I think I have.

I've always wanted to have a website but had no idea where to start with one.  So I decided to make the most of this "opportunity " for the want of a better word, and try to find out how to build one.

It's been much more work than I thought it would be but then again I had to learn how the system worked, I had no idea that the set up for a desktop would be different to a mobile device, well there you go, it obviously is.  All good though, it wasn't hard once I worked it out.

I had to get all the content together, that's not as easy as it sounds either.  But it was a bit of fun too.  That was the time where I wished I had labeled my photos properly.

I'm also working on 4 online courses and have just launched one, the Ninja Pups program, its perfect for dogs of any...