Train Your Small Dog - a podcast by Ty Brown

Recently, I’ve been helping a little girl named Luna through our boot camp. As I was working with Luna, I realized that 80% of the dogs we work with are medium or large dogs, and only about twenty percent would be called small dogs. People who are interested in finding a dog trainer here in Salt Lake City often ask if we even train small dogs at all!

Of course, we do work with small dogs. Unfortunately, we talk to much fewer people who are interested in training their smaller dogs. I think that there are a few reasons for that trend. For one, it’s easier to overlook misbehavior from a small dog. If a little dog jumps on you, that’s noticeably less of a problem than having a hundred-pound dog jump on you. Likewise, if a little dog poops in your house, that’s obviously not the same as an eighty-pound German Shepherd pooping in your house. That means that a lot of people overlook these problems when it comes to training their small dogs.

But I think this attitude does a huge disservice to these small dogs. If you think about it, small dogs have a more inherently difficult time in the world because everything is so much larger than them. Think of it like this: if you’re an eighty-pound dog, you’re on par with a child or a piece of furniture, you can easily reach people’s waists, and you’re generally on the same size plane as the objects surrounding you. If you’re a tiny fifteen-pound dog, however, you don’t fit as easily into a human world.

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