Changing Contexts: Understanding Perspective - a podcast by Ty Brown

In this article, I’d like to talk a bit about context—in other words, how how dogs perceive information.

At our company, we do a lot of boot camps. In these camps, both local people from here in Utah or people from out of state bring their dogs to us, and we train the dog and send it home. When I started doing these boot camps, I didn’t understand the concept of context deeply enough to realize that I needed to explain it to everyone. That was a young rookie mistake! So I would train the dog, bring it back to the owners, and tell them: “Here’s how you get it to be obedient. If he isn’t, then make sure you’re doing all these things.”

Owners were always surprised by these specifics. They thought that all they would need to do is say “sit” or “come” and their dog would do it automatically. I had to explain that their dog wasn’t a machine. Just because a dog understands a command in training doesn’t mean that he will automatically obey it for his owner without any kind of practice.

During one of the first bootcamps I did, I seriously annoyed an owner. This was probably nine or ten years ago. I trained a dog for a woman in her twenties who lived at home with her dad, brought the dog back home and showed her how to do all of the things we had practiced. The next day her dad called me and said “The dog isn’t listening to me.” I had to explain that since he hadn’t been present for the go-home session, he hadn’t learned how to handle the dog. His response? “What do you mean, you need to show me how to do things? The dog’s supposed to be trained, he’s supposed to listen!” I realized right then that I had screwed up. Not in the training—the dog was well-trained—but in not explaining context to his owners.

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