Well, I was very pleased to hear that clicker training her fearful pup had been really successful and once she got her into the building she was working on, she had no more hesitations.

Clicker training seems slow, and sometimes it almost hard to see the progress for that reason, until you realize the animal has just accomplished a major task or overcome a major hurdle. This video here, shows a mule that has been previously abused going through a similar process as my friend’s dog.

So did it stick? She took her dog to another house, but her dog resisted going in. Then she realized she had been working on getting her dog to come in through sliding glass doors. So she asked the house owner if she might try their sliding doors and sure enough the dog went right in with no hesitation.

Its interesting because it indicates the dog’s issue might not be around “going in” so much as “going through” In other words, it seemed to be the doorway itself, rather than being inside, or entering somewhere new.

I explained to my friend that she will likely have to work with her dog in a variety of situations before her dog would lose her fears of entrances because dogs are contextual learners, meaning they will learn something in a given context. They don’t tend to generalize as much as we do.

All too often you will hear dog owners in a new dog training class complain how stubborn their dogs is because while it sat fine at home, it refuses to sit in class. I have actually witnessed people being so embarrassed over their dogs “refusal” to listen and obey, that they spend most of the class trying to get that poor dog to sit instead of paying attention to what they are being taught.

The thing is, the dog has learned to sit in their living room, and that’s it. Sitting on the street or in class is simply not the same thing to a dog. They are asked to sit in class and they are thinking. “How can I possibly sit in the living room right now when we’re not in it!” So they wait for more information while we are busy tugging at their leash and yelling at them.