How To Have the Perfect Dog - a podcast by Ty Brown

Well, I hate to ruin things right away—but the perfect dog doesn't exist. That’s a tough thing for me to admit, because when it comes down to it I like to provide my clients with everything they want and need. I want them to have the perfect dog and be the happiest clients in the world. But at the end of the day, no one can create a perfect dog because no one is able to follow training principles perfectly—even dog trainers. It took me a long time to ever admit

When I first started dog training, I thought that my clients could never know that my dogs did things wrong sometimes. I believed they would think I was a bad trainer who didn’t know what I was talking about. As time went on, however, I realized that no matter how good a job I do at instructing, I’ll never produce the perfect dog.

My dogs are great, but even they aren’t perfect. They don’t cause a mess or chew stuff up, they come when called and heel when I ask them to, they can be left out without causing problems. They’re 96% of what people want out of a dog.

Every now and then Honey (my fourteen-year-old lady) will still steal something off the table. She never did that until we had kids; they were the ones who taught her. At the time I knew how to step in and fix it, but sometimes there’s an opportunity cost involved. The problem of Honey taking a piece of toast off the counter every once and a while isn’t worth the effort to fix. On the other hand, my dog Chip has started to get into the toilet. It’s pretty disgusting, so I’m absolutely working to correct it. Other than that, though, all she ever does is maybe jump on someone every once and a while.

So in general, my dogs are easy to maintain. In spite of their being very well trained, however, they still do things wrong. Again, the thing I always try to help people understand is that there are things we cannot negotiate on—things like aggression, solid obedience, destruction, house training, and good manners. If Chip were jumping on people all the time, for instance, then that would be non-negotiable. It would need to be dealt with right away. But with other problems, we need to look at the opportunity cost and ask whether it’s worth the amount of time and the amount of effort it would take to correct it.

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