Clients Even the Best Dog Trainers Can’t Help

Clients Even the Best Dog Trainers Can Not Help – Can You Take Professional Advice?

Being a dog trainer is very little about training dogs – that part is easy! – it’s all about educating and training people and that can be very difficult. A great dog trainer knows how to resolve issues through consistent training and has multiple solutions for the same issues, however sometimes there’s very little even the best of us can do if the client isn’t willing to learn. Here’s the client types that can not be trained, no matter how hard we try!

‘Yeah But No But’ personalities

Some clients are simply full of excuses and nothing you suggest will work for them. I can give you an example of a client like this I had years ago. The dog had bad reactivity issues towards other dogs and the mailman passing their house and the conversation went like this:

Me: Are you able to manage the reactivity when it happens by redirecting the dog?

Client: No, I work from home and can be on a call.

Me: Are you able to block access to trigger points such as windows/doors and move the dog to another room instead?

Client: No, I live with my parents in a small house so I need to consider them as well.

Me: Are you able to use a crate in those situations where you can not manage the behaviour?

Client: No, the house is very small, we really don’t have a space for that.

Me: Are you able to create a training session and actively work on the issues when the mailman shows up or create a similar situation to practise the right behaviour?

Client: No, I don’t know when it happens and I can be working. I can’t really bother others either.

Me: Are you able to leave the dog outside in the backyard instead without access to trigger points?

Client: No, we don’t really like the dog to be outside on his own.

Me: Are you able to give your dog a kong toy/treat puzzle toy/bone to distract him from reacting in the first place?

Client: Yeah, but he might go through it fast and then react.

Me: Ok, unfortunately there’s no magical fix for this, it’ll require active training and management otherwise this behaviour will not change. It sounds like you aren’t able to do anything to reinforce the behaviour you wish to see so nothing will change.

Know It All

This is often a person with no understanding on training and management dogs require but who will tell you ‘I have had dogs my whole life’. Well I have news for you, you can do something poorly your whole life and you can definitely own dogs without understanding much about them! These type of clients are the most frustrating ones to try and teach and open their minds to new training methods and knowledge.

 

Laughs It Off

And this is the saddest dog owner type I have met, they often have dogs with more serious issues such as fear-based aggresion/reactivity/obsessive behaviours and their reaction to it is to take it as if it was funny and laugh it off. Just recently I met a person with a fear reactive dog that I didn’t doubt for a second could bite a person that the owner thought was funny when the dog was going for people barking and trying to bite them. I thought it was heart-breaking how misunderstood the poor dog was.

 

No Commitment to Training

Unfortunately changing a dog’s behaviour often requires us to change ours. A lot of unwanted behaviours dogs have learnt were caused by their own owners – by accident or not. So if there’s no commitment to teach better behaviours there will not be any change either. Dogs will only do what benefits them and that can be very different to what we want.

 

No Ability to Learn

Some people simply aren’t good at taking advice. A great trainer can use hours with them, teaching them management and training techniques just to have the ower then go back to what they have done previously with no results. For example, we had a client’s dog who had been forced into their car when the dog was absolutely terrified of it. After a private training session focused on positive association building and having given advice of not forcing the dog in the car anymore otherwise it would get far worse the client still continued doing so which then caused the dog to start showing aggression to stop that forceful behaviour and the dog stopped wanting to go outside at all. So just because the client didn’t take the professional advice provided but instead continued doing what had caused the issue in the first place they made the situation far more severe! I always say that we can teach, educate and train the clients but we can not force them to follow the training techniques. This is just  a sad reality!