Obedience & Leadership Articles

Sit, drop, stay, recall — these are not the hard part of dog ownership. Any reasonably bright dog can be taught the words inside a fortnight. The hard part is the dog choosing to listen when there is a kangaroo over the fence, a delivery van in the driveway, or visitors at the door. That isn’t an obedience problem; it’s a leadership problem.

Articles in this category are built around that distinction. I write about the Five Rules of leadership, what calm energy actually feels like in your body (not just your dog’s), why bribery breaks down the moment the stakes go up, and how to ask for behaviour in a way the dog can’t misread.

The Five Rules are calm energy first, boundaries before commands, guide rather than bribe, follow through every time, and reward the state rather than the behaviour. They are simple to read and hard to do — which is why almost every consultation I run is mostly about coaching the human into doing them consistently, rather than teaching the dog anything new. The dog learned its part by week three of being in your house. The dog is waiting for the rest of the household to catch up.

Recall is the obedience question I get asked about most, and it is the one the leadership distinction matters for most. A dog with calm leadership comes when called because returning to you is the most rewarding thing in the environment. A dog with a treat-based recall comes when called as long as the value in your hand exceeds the value in the environment — which works in the kitchen and fails the first time a roo crosses the paddock. Articles in this category walk through that distinction in detail, including how to rebuild a recall that has already broken down on adolescent and adult dogs.

Loose-lead walking is the other one. Almost every owner I see has tried a head halter, a no-pull harness, a front-clip something, and at least one type of front-and-back combination. None of them holds for long because the pulling is not a hardware problem; it is the dog deciding it is in charge of where the walk goes. Once the leadership conversation has shifted, the lead becomes a thread the dog reads — not a tool the owner braces against. Pieces here cover how to build that, and how to recover a walk that has already turned into a daily wrestle.

If your dog "knows" what to do and just won’t do it when it counts, you don’t need more drilling. You need to show up differently. That’s what these pieces are about.