Hard Truth: Your Dog Isn’t In A Rush To Behave, Because You’re In A Rush For Results

One of the most common questions in dog training is “how long do you think this will take”? The honest answer is, I don’t know. Because your dog and your commitment to them are going to determine a large part of that timeline. Not me, not you and definitely not any amount of frustration or impatience.

Your dog doesn’t know that you want a problem fixed before your vacation or the holidays. They don’t know you’ve decided that this month is the month they need to finally “get it” or that you are tired of apologizing for their misbehaviour. Your dog learns at the pace that their learning history, genetics, temperament, environment, consistency and your training allow. Sometimes that takes time, a lot of time. If your dog has spent years rehearsing a behaviour, you shouldn’t be shocked when it takes more than a few months to change it.

If your dog has spent years learning that barking makes another dog or person go away, you shouldn’t expect a few training sessions to completely rewrite that history. If your dog has never learned how to disengage from something exciting, frustrating or scary, you have to actually teach that skill. You don’t get to skip the learning process because you’re impatient.

This is where people make one of the biggest mistakes in dog training. They become more focused on seeing the behaviour disappear than they are on actually changing the behaviour. They want the dog to stop barking, lunging, pulling, jumping, reacting and ignoring them NOW. So they start looking for the fastest possible way to suppress whatever they don’t like. Sometimes the dog does look better, but looking better and being better aren’t the same thing at all.

A dog can be physically controlled without understanding what is expected and a dog can be prevented from reacting without learning how to respond differently. A dog can be managed so perfectly that the owner thinks the problem is fixed, until the dog encounters the same struggle somewhere they can’t control the dog.

You cannot rush learning simply because you’re desperate for results and you certainly can’t build a reliable behaviour by constantly changing your approach because you haven’t seen enough progress quickly enough. Sometimes you simply haven’t done the work long enough.

Real behaviour change can be incredibly boring. It’s repetition and doing the same thing correctly over and over. It’s going back to easier environments when necessary and building a stronger response before asking for it under higher distraction. It’s reinforcing the behaviour you want until it is reliable and it’s continuing to train even when the initial instant gratification of “success” has worn off.

Because everybody wants the finished product but not everybody wants the process. Your dog doesn’t owe you a quick transformation because you’ve finally decided you’re ready to train and your trainer can’t manufacture progress that you’re unwilling to consistently reinforce between lessons.You cannot outsource commitment, if you train once a week and spend the other six days allowing the exact behaviour you’re trying to change, don’t blame the dog or training for the lack of results.

If you’re inconsistent with your expectations, don’t blame the dog for being inconsistent and if you’re only motivated when you’re seeing dramatic improvement, you’re going to struggle when progress slows down. Because progress isn’t always dramatic, sometimes it’s one extra moment of engagement, one less reaction, one better recovery, one more successful repetition and maybe one moment where your dog makes a different choice than they did yesterday. Those small wins are apart of the process and they’re what eventually create the big changes.

Stop wondering and asking “how long will this take?” and start asking “what does my dog need to learn and am I willing to put in the work consistently enough for them to learn it?”

The goal shouldn’t be to make your dog look better as quickly as possible, the goal should be to actually change the behaviour. If you’re constantly rushing the process because you need immediate results, you’re putting your own impatience ahead of your dogs learning. Your dog isn’t in a rush, you are and your impatience doesn’t change the timeline, the work does.