What Skills Does Your Dog Need?

… to live their best life with you?

I am sitting here writing this on a campsite in Dorset. I am away, as I am each month, on a training trip. Jess is currently snoozing on a blanket next to me while I enjoy a nice glass of merlot to help get the road out of my head. The van door is wide open, she has her harness on, but no lead. She is watching the dog in the caravan next to us, then her attention goes to a bird hopping around clearing up picnic crumbs from the grass.
 
I am thinking how clever she is. Or maybe have I trained all of this, so it’s me who is clever!
 
Hahaha, I wish it was that simple.
 
This week I am going to chat to you a bit about Jess and our adventures, because sometimes as dog trainers we portray about our dogs as perfect in the perfect video. That was pointed out to me by a client recently. The training videos we produce we try to make perfect, but our lives are not like that. Often, as dog trainers, we take on some very difficult dogs with big challenges. I have been owned by dogs with separation anxiety, dog to dog issues, over-excited teenagers, fearfulness, barking, eating poop, grooming issues, and more.
 
Hopefully this blog does not come across as self-indulgent, because what I wanted to put across is a bit about how I have built those skills over the years … and what’s still to come.

Jess, not perfect, but the perfect dog for me

Jess was not an easy dog.

She had been in a brilliant rescue, but she was a bit of a free spirit. I was recently reminded of how she slipped her lead when being walked at the rescue and went on an adventure much to the dismay of the trainer who was working with her. She was nervous about a lot of things including men and children. Women she was better with. She had no recall to speak of, lead walking was okay but she had a habit of suddenly pulling you through a gap in a hedge or over a wall, cat chasing had been ‘switched on’ with her. She was generally friendly with dogs and people.

The pic is a reminder that she was a very different dog then.
 
Back to now. Jess needs real-life skills to come with me on these trips. Not sitting, laying down, paws and tricks that some new dog owners inevitably concentrate on. What she needs is to be able to live the life I live, be adaptable, be trusted and trusting, be sociable, understand that sometimes I will tell her what to do, and sometimes she can do what she wants to do.
 
Please understand, she is not the perfect dog, far from it. She has had her troubles still, but they are manageable.
 
Here’s the top 4 skills for us going away, and notice how I include her welfare in each of them.

1. Have her super happy in the van and the car

That could be travelling in the van for long distances and to be happy to setting in the van while I am not there. Travelling is the van is a really important part of my life. We do some long journeys and I am not one for doing loads of stops. Of course, if she needed to, we would stop, but I would rather just get where we are going.
 
On the way home from the rescue she was packed in the car with two other dogs with physical and visual barriers between them.   I remember stopping at a service station and wished that we hadn’t. She was pulling to get through any gap in the fence, pulling away from me. We would have been far better just carrying on and letting her rest. Since then we have worked on taking her to lots of places and obviously building our relationship which was non-existent at the time.
 
We were lucky that travelling seemed okay for her, but there was another hurdle to get over … being happy left in the car on her own. That meant not chewing, being able to settle, not barking and so on. For example, if I am away on my own, I need to know I can go off for a shower without worrying about what she is doing.
 
We started off with her in a crate, both for her safety and to protect the car from a bitey chewy puppy. That transitioned to being out with a crash tested harness on. She was not so keen on the harness as they can be a bit chunky, and she chewed once when she got herself a bit tangled, but on the whole she is fine after we worked on getting the harness on and off, short journeys and then building up.

Now, if the van or car door is open, she is straight in there, ready for the next adventure!

2. Have her be comfortable about where she sleeps

And that could be anywhere. Simply put … where I lay her blanket is her home.
 
As I mentioned, when we first got Jess we had two other dogs. She had a crate for a while at home which was what she was used to at the rescue, then that transitioned to a bed.
 
For me, one simple skill I taught Jess is that a blanket is her bed, her home and somewhere that she can settle and hopefully feel safe. It’s an important skill and I use it every day:

• When I need to set up the van at night, I have two blankets. I pop one down, she moves there. I make up the bed, pop the other blanket down, she moves there.
• When we go to sit somewhere such as a café, we take a blanket.
• When I vacate the bed in the morning a blanket goes over it before she gets on.

 Sometimes I simply need to move or put a blanket down, and often if there is not blanket she won’t get up on the sofa at all. It’s become a way of life.

3. Be calm around random animals, people and children

 There are lots of things you might meet on a campsite including ducks, rabbits, geese, deer plus she needed the ability the to cope with children passing and playparks.
 
When we first got Jess, cats was switched on with her. We don’t have many cats near us, and the only ones she sees are feral cats in the field, so we have not spent any time working on that.
She was terrified of children when she first arrived with us and that is something I have documented before, gradually getting her used to being around children and ignoring them. Now we can walk around and she will take no notice. Recently we didn’t realise that we had booked to go away at half-term. The playpark was full of noise … she was not phased at all.
 
With animals, we did some tracking through places where there were animals and she was happy to ignore and get back to her job. Early on we went to a site where there was a large pond and lots of ducks. We went out early and pottered around the lake, ducks pecking for grubs and her getting on with their own little job of sniffing. Everyone was calm, no other dogs or people around to disrupt. It was a good introduction and we built from there. You can see in the picture how close we were ... I was so proud of her that day. We left before anything exciting happened and built up over the few days we were on this site.

4. Not be concerned about people walking close to the vehicle

When we first went away to a campsite, Jess had never been in a situation where people were passing close to her. We live in a house behind a wall, so no passing dogs or people.

This was a big change for her.

I spent the first day sitting with her gently reinforcing what I wanted … calmness. I created a space that I knew would help her be calm (her blanket) and to start with every time a dog barked, someone walked past or a noise invaded our peace, I talked calmly, fed her small bits of food, and settled myself into the moment. I might occasionally ask her to lay down (a skill I had taught) or say her name to get her attention back on me, but often, as we progressed, I would let her feel the moment and self-calm.

One of the keys to this was management.

We made sure she was not able to escape. That meant we could relax. We didn't stop her looking at things, but knowing she could not get out kept our behaviour very calm. We also strategically placed things like guy ropes so that people could not come too close when we could.

Building blocks

Some of the things Jess does, I have trained, in the traditional sense of training. What I mean by that is that I decided what I needed her to do and trained it.  She can sit, lay down, drop things, come to me, move on, go on her blanket, and so on. We built most of these up in the first few months with her and continue to refresh through the years.
 
Other skills we have worked on gradually such as helping her be confident around the things in life that she was initially cautious about. That does not mean striding into every situation. It seems to me, as far as I can read, she is still cautious, but not nervous. We have a lot of people in and out of our house, and sometimes she engages with them, sometimes she checks to see who they are then disappears. It’s her choice.
 
Some things have naturally improved with maturity and repetition such as her ability to settle and hang around on the lead when I chat to people.
 
Some things we are still working on. A silly example maybe, but she hates kissing stiles. You know the ones I mean with the swinging gate in a U shaped fence. She has always hated doors banging shut, or doors just a couple of inches open that might bang shut (we generally either have doors wide open, or completely shut our house), so this is the worst for her. She wants to continue, but everything in her being, if feel, means it is not safe.  I have resorted to picking her up and carrying her through or over. It’s something to work on, but these stiles they are common in Dorset, rare in Cornwall.

Over to you

Get a piece of paper, or your phone, or whatever way you like to record things and write a list. Think finishing the sentence ‘I would like to be able to…’ rather than getting into the detail of what your dog needs to be doing.
 
Then think about what skills your dog needs to be able to do the things on your list.
 
There are a lot of skills involved in some of the things we ask our dogs to do. If there are training gaps, and that means you need to do some training. If there are emotional impacts and we need to be mindful of what our dogs can and cannot cope with at any given point. Each of these building blocks will be part of the final behaviour.
 
Then rehearse those skills. It does not need to be a huge amount of time, and the more you can integrate into day to day life the more likely it is going to happen. We have a lot of gates, so there is a lot of practice. For safety, I don’t want her barging through. I might ask her to come close, but often she does it out of habit now. It means whenever we are passing through a gate or threshold, she holds back. It’s good for doors, gates in the garden, and gates and stiles on a walk, plus it seems to have generalised to people coming to the door and not rushing out.
 
Let me know, what life skills does your dog have? And what is there still to work on?