A super common issue dog owners have is that while their dog is well behaved at home, once out in the world they suddenly have no recall or responsiveness to their owner. Are they just “naughty” or is there more to the story?
Consider a child learning to read and write. They first learn individual letters and sounds, then putting them together to form words, then making sentences, then paragraphs and so on. Imagine teaching a child the alphabet and then expecting them to write an essay!
That’s unreasonable, right? Yet, that’s what we often do to our dogs. We teach them to come to us at home and then expect them to do so at the beach or the park.
To set our dogs up for success, we need to practice the behaviour and get it really solid in a less challenging environment before testing it out somewhere really exciting for the dog. This idea is called “proofing” the behaviour.
Only increase the challenge level of the environment by one aspect at a time, and take it gradually. It helps to consider the 3 Ds of dog training- Distance, Distraction and Duration. I’ll explain more about the 3Ds in the next post…
Super Dogz 
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