10/12/2024
TODAY OUR BREED EXPERT Carol Price is looking at:
BORDER COLLIE TRAINING - WHAT GOES WRONG AND WHY?
One of the greatest myths expounded about Border collies is that are always 'easy to train'. When what they really are, instead, is exceptionally fast learners. This means they can learn all the 'wrong' things just as rapidly as the 'right' ones, unless we more skilfully take control of this whole learning process in our dogs from as early on in their lives as possible.
Collies are also very speedy 'ingrainers'. In that once they have learned or discovered a particular type of behaviour that brings some reward for them, they may more stubbornly wish to retain it, or find it harder to abandon this preferred behaviour in favour of some newer one you may later want them to learn.
BREED VARIETY
Of course collies, as in all aspects of their behaviour, can vary greatly in how responsive they are to different types of training - and genetics can certainly play a part in this. In that dogs from some more classic Obedience, or other working lines, can often have a higher capacity for learning, or undertaking specific tasks, or just greater handler responsiveness in general. As well as a keener desire to both please and co-operate with a handler or owner.
But you can still never take this as a given when you get your own dog. Or imagine they will automatically be like any collie you have had before. Because some collies – as outlined in this feature – definitely can be more challenging to train, and if you have had this experience with a dog, it can help to try to better understand why.
SUPER-SENSITIVE DOGS
Some collies, for instance, can be exceptionally sensitive to any kind of mental pressure exerted by an owner - even if you may just class this yourself as 'encouragement' . The super sensitive dog is motivated predominantly by a desire to remain within a specific sensory comfort zone, and cannot cope too well when pushed too far beyond it.
Thus any form of louder, harsher or more pressurising voice tone or body language in training, or even just some more obvious sense of disapproval or disappointment displayed by you about their behaviour, may crush them or make them mentally shut down and withdraw from further interaction with you.
This is a reaction that so often gets interpreted by an owner as the dog just being 'stubborn' or ‘disobedient’. At which point they may try exerting even more pressure on them until the ‘shut down’ problem gets ever worse or more ingrained.
Dogs like these really need the lightest of touches in training, and the calmest and most sympathetic forms of handling. Everything they do is right, and clever, and gets your approval. It is just that some things - i.e. the things you want them to do most - are always more clever than others, and bring them the highest rewards. Dogs like these may also always thrive most being trained one-to-one, rather in a group training environment. But once you get the approach right, they really can be a joy to train.
CONTROL RESISTANT DOGS
One of the hardest type of collie to train – and which I have written about before on this page -is the dog more psychologically resistant to being controlled. I.e. dogs who are predominantly motivated by a desire to both exert and retain control, and never surrender this feeling of control, over their own actions or movements, to others.
For this reason, it always tends to be the exercises that require a dog to surrender control – to you - of their actions, movements or more personal agenda or space that cause the greatest levels of resistance; like down and stay or recall on command, or walking beside you more slowly on the lead. And the more you push, the more they may try to resist. They may also respond less well to being groomed or physically restrained in some way.
It is easy to get more frustrated with dogs like these. But often the problems you experience with them in later life date back to the very early basic building blocks of your training with them. Where you teach all puppies that responses like focus and co-operation will consistently bring them the highest rewards in life, and they are also given the opportunity to more actively choose these responses for themselves, rather than have them imposed on them with some greater sense of pressure. It is also important to realise that control resistant dogs cannot help the way they are psychologically wired, and are thus not acting from any more conscious sense of 'defiance' or refusal to 'respect' you.
They will always need a higher level of patience and persistence to train, as well as a constant reminding that whatever you ask them to do will carry far higher rewards for them than not doing it. Ultimately you just have to learn to think more like them, and work out what would most motivate you to do what someone else asked you to do if you had their kind of psychology. Which is actually a basic principle you should apply to the training of all dogs.
‘BAGGAGE’
Another really common reason for poorer responses to training in our dogs is the reality that we too often bring our own emotional/psychological baggage into the whole training process – often without realising it.
Things like our own lower sense of confidence, or – as previously outlined – a sense that our dog does not ‘respect’ us enough, or we may just be too impatient, unrealistic or too quickly frustrated, when it comes to what we expect from our dogs, given the quality of guidance we are giving them, or what they are more individually capable of delivering.
Either way, all these things can cause a more hostile or negative energy or ‘fog’ to build up around us, whenever we are trying to teach or get our dog to do something for us. Which can then lead to the dog also making far more negative associations themselves with the whole training process.
ALL ABOUT THE DOG
The greatest lesson I ever learned about training dogs is that it is all about what THE DOG needs, not YOU. So the more you can take all your own ego and baggage out of the equation, and just focus entirely on what your dog needs from you, to not only learn new things, but also LOVE doing them, the more successful your training will be. Because dogs will never love doing things that bring them little reward.
Also, never, ever assume that a dog should always ‘know’ what you want them to do. Some dogs will always take longer not just to learn things, but also retain what has been learned, so that their later responses to specific commands or exercises can become more reliable.
This feature has just given you some common examples of how a collie's innate psychology may clash with the way they are being trained. But there are so many other quirks of collie personality, or thought process, that can make your training fail for the same reason. These are all covered in far greater depth - along with more extensive advice on what to do about it - in BOOKS TWO (Essential Life Skills & Learning) and THREE (on Behaviour) of my BREED APART trilogy: :
All text ©Carol Price 2024
Carol Price collie books: In the UK from: https://performancedog.co.uk/?s=carol+price In the USA from: https://www.dogwise.com/ # and https://www.cleanrun.com/product/border_collies_a_breed_apart_book_1_secrets_of_the_working_mind/index.cfm In Canada from https://4mymerles.com/collections/books In Australia from: https://gameondogs.com.au/ And in the Netherlands and Belgium from: https://mediaboek.nl/border-collies-a-breed-apart-book-1.html
Puppy, Juniors, Older dogs welcome. KC Good Citizen all levels. Fun and reward based. DTC approved
