27/10/2026 - Training
If your dog keeps slipping back into the habits you are working so hard to change, the answer is often not more training but better control and management. That simply means setting up your dog’s world so they cannot keep practising the behaviours you don’t want while you are teaching them the ones you do. It is one of the most important parts of supporting training, and although the phrase sounds rather formal, the idea behind it is wonderfully practical.
Every time your dog rehearses an unwanted behaviour, whether that is bolting out of the front door, jumping up at visitors or chasing a rabbit when you call them back, that behaviour gets a little stronger, so the progress you have made quietly slides backwards. You can teach a dog to settle on their bed when the doorbell rings, to wait at the threshold and to keep four paws on the floor when guests arrive. But if nothing physically stops them making a different choice while they are still learning, every greeting becomes a gamble, and you end up hoping with your fingers crossed that today is a good day.
A helpful way to picture it is a board game. Each successful repetition moves you one step forward, but every time your dog gets to practise the old behaviour you land on a snake and slide three steps back, and then you have to repeat the good behaviour several more times just to get back to where you were. This is a big part of why training can feel like it takes forever, because you are constantly regaining lost ground rather than building on it, and control and management is what stops those backward slides from happening so often.
In practice it is usually simpler than people expect. For a dog who rushes the front door, that might mean a stair gate across the hallway, a lead clipped on before guests come in, keeping the inner door shut and locked, or fencing the front garden so there is a second barrier if the first one fails. For recall, the most effective management tool is often just a long line, because if your dog spots a rabbit and decides to go, they reach the end of the line, realise chasing isn’t an option, and are far more likely to come back to you, which means they practise the right choice rather than the wrong one.
We already think this way with children, putting locks on cupboards and gates at the bottom of the stairs without a second thought, and dogs and puppies need the same forward planning. Management isn’t only for fixing problems either, because when you are teaching something new, such as loose lead walking with a young puppy, choosing quieter places where they can succeed and using a long line to reduce the chance of pulling both help learning happen faster.
Nobody gets it right every time, and there will be days when the gate is left open or the lead slips out of your hand, so please go easy on yourself when that happens. Whenever you are working on a behaviour, from reactivity to jumping up to recall, the question worth asking is how you can set things up so your dog doesn’t get the chance to practise the thing you are trying to change, because every successful training plan has good control and management quietly holding it together.
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