Dog owners come to me all the time with the same complaint: My dog doesn’t listen to me, and I don’t know why!
The reason is usually some version of the same answer.
If your dog does not listen to you, it is either that
- They do not yet fully know a command
- Haven’t practiced it enough under distractions
- A competing motivator or trigger is more enticing than you
That’s really it.
Knowing which one is causing your dog’s non-compliance is another task, and fixing the issue is going to depend on which — or which combination of — reasons your dog has for not listening to you.
In this article, I’m going to talk about a few other more nuanced situations that I hear commonly from dog owners, and also discuss how you can fix those problems! If you’re looking for a specific type of my-dog-doesn’t-listen-to-me, here’s a quick list you can jump to:
Why does my dog not listen to me but listens to others?
With our dogs, every moment is training. Every interaction we have with our dogs is teaching them something about us, and what they can expect for the future.
You can call this “relationship,” if you like! Through examples we set, day-in and day-out for our dogs, our dogs learn how we will respond to different situations.
They add the context of their handler to their training.
This is why some dogs will listen to one person in the household and not the others, or seem to misbehave for just one member of the family. If that person does not consistently reward wanted behaviors and correct unwanted ones, that will become context for that dog’s behavior.
A lot of times you’ll hear that all members of the family need to be more “dominant.” In reality, all members of the family need to be consistent.
If your partner is consistent with supervising the family dog and sticking to training (including management and follow-through of unwanted behaviors!) and you are not, it is unlikely your dog will be more consistent for your partner.
It’s what they’ve learned.
Why does my dog not listen to me outside?
The great outdoors, as well, brings with it a whole lot of complications. It’s full of a thing we call the “real world.”
The real world has squirrels, other dogs, cars, birds, people, and fun things all over the ground. It’s a lot of noise out there.
I talk all about the real world in my article, How to Keep You and Your Dog Safe on a Walk.
When we take our dogs from a sterile environment (like, for instance, the quiet room indoors that you use to teach new commands) and bring them outside, it’s like setting them in front of fifty TV screens with volume blaring and asking them to focus on only one: us.
Even the backyard is full of distractions.
Getting your dog to focus and listen to you only in that world of distractions takes practice and ideally a gradual increase of difficulty over some time.
Where this becomes tricky is that, when your dog has chances to ignore you (even if it’s understandable to do so under the circumstances) they make chances to damage their training.
If your dog runs off after a rabbit and you don’t have a means to stop it and get your dog back under control, this practices the very rewarding behavior of chasing rabbits. Chasing rabbits will become more and more of a habit, and harder to break later.
You can respond to situations like these with a correction on a suitable e-collar, but it is better to scale your dog appropriately rather than use higher correction levels, if you can avoid it.
My recommendation is to manage your dog carefully while working up in distractions. That might mean keeping your dog on a long leash, even in your backyard. It might mean making use of a good muzzle so your dog can’t eat nasties off the sidewalk the first moment you’re distracted.
Dogs being distracted under distraction is normal, and for most dogs it’s perfectly reasonable to expect training to get them more reliable under those distractions.
Why does my dog not listen to me when I say no?
Dogs ignore “no” when we fail to make “no” mean something.
Many owners chant “no” or some variant of it without ever giving it meaning. Just like we make “good” or “yes” mean something by following it with a reward, we make “no” mean something by following it with a correction.
Like I talk about in my article, The Economics of Dog Behavior, not all corrections have to be a pop on the collar or a stim on a remote collar. Anything that effectively reduces a behavior is what the science calls a “punisher.”
But when your dog hears “no” and never receives context in the moment, it never takes on any meaning to your dog.
Even worse is when your dog hears “no,” but continues to be rewarded in some way following it. When you yell no at your dog for fence-fighting with the neighbor’s dog, but have no means to stop it, the word takes on even less meaning because the dog is indulging in a stimulating self-rewarding behavior. Similarly, “no” becomes even further associated with good things if it’s said while your dog is chomping down on the steak they stole off the counter without a correction to counter it.
If your dog doesn’t listen to “no,” consider the context in which you usually say it, and decide if it’s in your best interest to recontextualize its meaning.
Why did my dog not listen to me sometimes?
Sometimes your dog will listen to you, and sometimes they won’t. This comes down to motivators, like all dog training, and it’s the reason that consistency and management is so important.
If something else is going on to compete with what you’re asking your dog to do, your dog will ultimately weigh which will be more rewarding to them. What your dog decides will vary depending on the dog, the handler, and the circumstances, but the weighing of motivators will always be present.
If you tell your dog to sit but there’s a particularly awesome pee-smell in that bush nearby, that pee-smell is a competing motivator and your dog may not listen the way they usually do.
You can fix this by continuing to use rewards that sweeten the deal of listening to you and scaling up progressively to more challenging distractions. If you’re struggling to get your dog’s attention or compliance despite having some great rewards on you, you may be pushing your dog too far a little too son.
You can also use corrections to lessen the temptation of competing motivators, which is often necessary when moving a dog to the next level of a behavior progression. Some dogs are just always over threshold, and need a little bit of feedback to understand what they’re not supposed to be doing.
In a perfect world, use both and scale appropriately!
Why does my dog not listen to me when I call them?
Recall is a learned skill, and can be an especially difficult one when there are the aforementioned distractions and competing motivators. The same rules apply to your dog coming back when called as detailed for other issues of non-compliance.
Where recall is especially tricky is that if your dog chooses a competing motivator or non-compliance, they are instantly rewarded and there is often not a lot you can do. If you are not doing e-collar training, training recall is a specifically demanding protocol involving a lot of practice and management.
Keep in mind that if your dog pretty consistently not responding to recall, even in lower-distraction environments, they probably just don’t know what it means, and need to get their repetitions in on a reward-based obedience system.
Make sure that you are practicing recall with reward regularly if you are struggling with getting your dog to come back when you need them to.
Additionally, anticipate when you might encounter a recall struggle and employ the use of a long line for management so that your dog can never self-reward off ignoring a recall.
