Giving Your Dog a Job to Do

One of the many things I learned from the workshop is the biggest mistake that most dog owners make with their dogs is that they don't give their dogs work to do.

The reason service dogs are so well-behaved is that they always have work to do.

Now, by “job” or “work”, I don’t mean that a service dog is always doing something physical in nature.

Instead, what I mean is that when you give a service dog the hand signal for the DOWN cue for instance, here’s how the service dog would have been trained to think:

“My owner has now given me the job of lying down. So I will remain lying down here in this exact spot until my owner tells me to do something else, because the job that my owner wants me to do for her now is to lie down.”

So unlike most “normal” dogs who think of DOWN as just a trick that they have to perform for a few seconds after which they can do whatever they feel like, service dogs think of DOWN as a serious job that they have to do with commitment, dedication and purpose until they get their next job from their owner.

As you can imagine, it’s a dramatically different mindset!

And this mindset is the reason service dogs are so well-behaved, and so many “normal” dogs (even if they know cues like DOWN or SIT) are not.