How To Teach Your Dog To Behave in Public

We recently published a video on how to teach your dog to behave in public and we wanted to dig a little deeper into why it’s so important to stay focused on your training goals by breaking training into small parts for your dog.

When it comes to teaching your dog to behave in public, your first training session can’t be in public. Consider the first time you learned how to drive or ride a bike. You didn’t start practicing driving on the highway and you didn’t start practicing riding a bike by flying down a steep hill.

When it comes to dog training, we need to break everything down into small steps. When we say everything, we mean everything. For example, does your dog know how to sit at home or in your backyard? Okay great, now we need to teach them to sit on grass, on pavement, on slick surfaces, at a crowded park, on a walk, etc. A great trainer once told me that the skills you teach your dog are the same skills they will use to process the information they see in the world.

When we identify a weak spot in our dog’s training, we don’t need to panic. We need to get back in the classroom (our living room), put on a training leash, grab a clicker, and work on that weak spot. If you’ve skipped ahead and taken your dog in public, only to find they were misbehaving, anxious, or overstimulated, try breaking things down for them. We call this training progression.

Start with your goal: My dog listens to me in public. If you’re a visual person you can visualize yourself with your well-trained dog in public. Then consider the obstacles, what areas does your dog need training in order to reach this goal? Break up each area into small sessions and go from there. Each area you two master brings you one step closer to your goal. If you need help building a training progression for you and your dog, we can help!