
12/09/2025
Why Teach Your Dog 'Sit'
Sit, what's the point of teaching your dog to sit? I've never understood it. Not for behavior. It's a bit of fun for the wife or the kids to do, teach their dog to sit and give them a treat, and that' the end of that.
The largest shady secondhand dog dealer, the RSPCA, teaches sit to every single dog they've got, and then they sell it off to people. And that dog's wild and unruly. So... What's the point of it all?
Let's imagine a secondhand car dealer, and they're the largest secondhand car dealer in the whole world. And you buy a car off them, then you take it down the road. Before you get home, the car's playing up. It's jumping all over the place. Brakes don't work. And you ring them up.
Let's call them the RSPWC (Royal Society of P**s Weak Cars) car dealers. And when you ring them up and say, "My car's all faulty," they say, "Well, it was all right when we had it." You say, "Well, it's not all right now." And they reply, "Well, we showed you how to put oil in it,. "But I've done that." you say.
"We showed you how to polish it." "Yeah, I've done that too, It's still not running properly."... "Well, you must have done something wrong. If you want, bring it back to us we'll send it to the knacker's yard, and we won't give you your money back."
There'd be an outcry if that happened. They'd be out of business in no time. But the RSPCA get away with it. What is up with people?. If they give you a shady deal...create a storm. Go to the papers. Tell them how they've done you. And they won't give you your money back. How they lied.
They tell you, "Yeah, this dog's all right with children," then it tries to bite your children. That's shady stuff. But it can sit if you offer it a treat. So what's the point of it sitting?
There are some group obedience trainers who use sit all the time. You'll go in a group, and you teach your dog to sit, and it's all good fun.
Everyone has a good time in those obedience classes. Their dogs sit, and you walk to and fro, you do all those fun things. Some of those trainers make things really fun.
That's a decent hobby, but it doesn't create good behavior.
When you take your dog home and it jumps on the settee, telling it to sit isn't going work. You pull, it off and tell it to sit, well how can it sit there for three hours? As soon as it's not sitting, it jumps back up.
You have to have good behavior.
When you're cooking in the kitchen and your dog comes in, it's pointless telling it to sit. You have to teach them to get out of the kitchen and do what? Who cares what It does... Just don't come into the kitchen. Good behaviour doesn't need an alternative behaviour. Just stop the bad behavior.
Gun dog trainers, I can see the point of them training sit. Some of the best trainers in the world are gun dog trainers.
It's very hard to teach a highly charged hunting dog to be that obedient.
They tell the dog to sit while they wait to shoot a duck. They shoot at the duck and miss, and the dog still sits there. Then they shoot one and say, "Go and get it." And the dog goes and retrieves it straight to their hand, lets it go, comes around and sits down again. That is very, very good training.
Any pet owner who has a gun dog type, go to a gun dog trainer to learn just basic obedience, because what they'll teach you will really help. However... I think there's a better way.
If I had a gun dog, I wouldn't be teaching it sit. I'd be taking four little boundary sticks out and teach it to stand in the boundary. It can lay down, sit, do whatever it wants, and it's got room to fidget around, and you've got a clear place where it's going to be. It's not going to shuffle forward, That would be a far easier thing to train.
If you want to teach your dog to sit, by all means teach it for fun and a treat. I don't want to stop people having fun with dogs. I'm just saying, it's not the best way to have a nice, well-behaved dog. If you know different, tell me. Tell me why that's a good training tool to have a well-behaved dog in the home. There you go. Tell me what you think.
Cheerio