If you hire me as a trainer you can expect some questions to be asked about your human family. I’m going to want to know who lives in the home, how much time they spend with the dog(s) and what kind of relationship they have with the dog.
If you tell me that the rest of your family isn’t interested in training the dog, or that you want to use hands-off training while your partner refuses to walk your dog without a prong collar, we have a major problem!
Imagine you are one of two parents with a child. You have decided that the child cannot watch television. Your partner doesn’t share your viewpoint and allows the child to watch television. In this case, the child is going to continue to watch television and even develop a stronger habit of watching television. The child’s behavior can’t change until your conflict with your spouse is resolved.
This happens with dog training all the time. You can spend plenty of money on a trainer, learn all the best techniques to teach your dog to sit politely for petting, practice every single day and still fail because someone else in your household is reinforcing your dog for jumping up. This IS a failure in training, but not a failure of the methods or the trainer.
This is one of the reasons that I avoid working with just one family member. I want the whole family there so I can get a feel for who is on board for what. A good trainer can find ways to motivate the family to agree on a training plan, but some issues have to be worked out between the family.
One of the worst situations is when one family member calls a trainer saying that the dog must be trained because another family member is threatening to “get rid of” the dog. If the threatening family member is willing to join in the training then this can be a workable situation. If the threatening family member really just doesn’t want the dog they may sabotage any training efforts so that the dog fails and can be removed from the home.
So, before you call a trainer, take a look at your family dynamics. Is there anyone who is going to stand in the way of training? Is there anything you can do to remedy that situation? Is everyone on board as to what issues should be addressed and what issues they don’t mind living with? A family meeting about the dog might be a good place to start.
A trainer is not a family counselor and should not be expected to come in and decide for you who is right and who is wrong. Really, that’s IS what some people want me to do. They call me in hoping that I will tell their partner that they are doing it all wrong and make them do it differently. I can’t do that! What is right or wrong depends on what you want/expect from your dog. If each family member has a different expectation then everyone might be doing just the right thing to get the dog that they want.
What I can do is to help your family sort through differing expectations and come up with compromises, realistic goals and ways to work together for a dog that makes everyone happy. This requires that the entire family is willing to sit down with a trainer, talk about what they want and join in on the training.
Filed under: Relationship with Dogs, Training
