Living with a Dog Includes Management

There is a difference between responding to something your dog is doing in everyday life and training them. 
 
I think a lot of dog trainers focus on the training aspect of dog ownership, at least when we’re talking to our clients. We do a ton of everyday life management and we don’t even realize all of the management tools and exercises that we are using. And sometimes we think that we can just attribute the dog’s everyday behavior to our training, when in reality it’s the training, it’s the dog’s genetics, and it is the management. Most trainers instinctively use management. It’s woven into our daily life without much thought. We instinctively know that we need to kennel some dogs. We instinctively know we need to feed some dogs in their kennels so they can’t bite the other dogs. We instinctively know that we might need to throw a drag line onto certain dogs in the house or in the yard so that we can just go collect them when we’re not in the mood to be in training mode and the dog isn’t fully trained yet.  
 
So when we show our clients the training exercises, but neglect to include the management strategies we use in conjunction with the training, our clients are missing a huge part of the program. They may also be receiving an unrealistic picture of what dog ownership looks like. Dog ownership includes management for the life of the dog, and many folks, especially first-time dog owners, don’t know this. 
 
Let’s look at an example. Recall training is an essential part of dog ownership. Everyone wants a dog that comes in from the yard when they’re called.  When a dog owner is struggling with this, they will call a trainer. We show up and teach the recall exercises, and we’ll present it as “this is your solution.” But we could also roll into that the management pieces. We can say “there’s a layered approach here. We can put a drag line on the dog so that when it’s time to come in you can just go grab the long line and just bring them in without having a power struggle, without bribing, without pleading and begging and getting frustrated.” And then when the human and the dog are in the right frame of mind, they can practice the recall training exercises.  
 
I find so much of my job is explaining to clients that there is living with a dog and then there’s training a dog, and those feel very different. We can do the training when we are in the headspace to do training, and we can lean on management when we’re not in the mood to be actively training. If we try to do the training when we’re rushed, when we’re angry, when we’re frustrated, or when we’re tired, we are not going to be good trainers.  If we’re not in the right headspace, we can accidentally poison our cues (especially recall cues) and the training can backfire! 

Trainers should be offering personal stories about how we live our lives with our dogs, and the management strategies we use. Our dogs aren’t usually obedient robots. Sometimes we put drag lines on our dogs so that we can collect them because they sometimes refuse to come in from the yard, and sometimes we’re tired.  
 
Management happens throughout the life of the dog.