What Are You Actually Saying to Your Dog?

Clearer cues, calmer conversations and a dog who has a fair chance of understanding you

There is a familiar moment in dog training when an owner asks for a sit, waits, asks again, and then repeats the word with rather more conviction. By the third or fourth attempt the voice has become deeper, the owner is leaning forwards, one hand is moving and the lead has tightened. The dog finally sits. “See?” says the owner. “He knows it. He was just choosing not to.”

Perhaps he was. Dogs have preferences, competing interests and days when the thing we want is not especially high on their list. But there is another possibility: the dog has learned that the word sit, on its own, is not the important part of the instruction. Sit may mean something when it is accompanied by a hand movement, when the owner is standing directly in front of him, or only after the voice changes and the lead begins to apply pressure. From our side of the conversation the request felt perfectly clear. From the dog’s side, half a dozen pieces of information arrived at once, and he had to work out which of them mattered.

We are quick to describe dogs as stubborn, distracted or disobedient, yet much less quick to examine the conversation that came before the apparent refusal. That is worth doing, because dogs do not arrive with a dictionary. No word has an automatic meaning to them: not sit, come, yes, good, no, or even their own name. Words acquire meaning through repetition and consequence, alongside all the movements, habits and changes of tone that surround them. The dog is always learning a pattern; the awkward question is whether it is the pattern we thought we were teaching.

A word only matters if it carries information

If we want a cue to be useful, it needs to predict something reliably enough that the dog can act on it. This does not require military precision, and accidentally saying a word twice will not ruin a dog. It does mean that endless repetition gradually turns useful information into background noise. A recall that usually sounds like “come… come on… Billy, come… come here, mate” teaches the dog that the first word is merely an opening offer. There will be several more, and possibly the sight of a person marching across the field, before anything really changes.

A better habit is to give the cue once and then pay attention to the answer. If the dog responds, mark and reinforce it. If he does not, ask what has made the request difficult. Did he hear it? Has he learned this behaviour in this place, or only in the kitchen? Is the distraction beyond anything you have practised? Are you asking for a recall in a rabbit-filled field when the training history consists of six feet across the garden? Those questions are not excuses for the dog; they tell us what to train next. Moving closer, reducing the distraction, using a long line or helping the dog through a familiar behaviour all give him more useful information than saying the same word progressively louder.

This also stops us confusing training with testing. If a dog succeeds in an easy setting and then fails in a much harder one, we have learned something about the present limits of the training. We have not necessarily uncovered a moral defect. Clear communication includes being honest about what a cue currently means to that dog, in that environment and at that level of excitement.

It is useful, too, to notice what happens before and after the word. Many dogs respond beautifully to a verbal cue while a piece of chicken is held near the handler’s chest, but appear to forget it when the food disappears. Often the dog was following the picture as a whole: the food, the hand position, the posture and the familiar location. None of that is a problem while a behaviour is being taught. It only becomes a problem if we assume the word has taken over when it has not. Once a dog is succeeding, make the other clues smaller and more deliberate. Say the cue before reaching for food. Keep your hands still occasionally. Change where you stand. Let the word have a chance to do some work.

Markers, praise and permission

Humans are rather imprecise with praise. We watch a dog do something well, tell him what a clever boy he is, reach into a pocket and deliver food several seconds later. During that interval he may have sat, looked away, stood up and nudged our hand. The reward still has value, but its address label is smudged. A marker gives us a way to identify the moment we mean: that thing you did just then is the thing that earned the reward.

The particular vocabulary is not important, but the jobs need to be reasonably clear. In my own training, yes can tell the dog that he has earned a reward. Good can offer quieter feedback that he is doing the right thing and should continue. Break or go on can release him from the behaviour. Another trainer might choose yep, nice and free. Dogs are not interested in our choice of English; they are interested in what each sound consistently predicts.

The distinction between praise and release causes more confusion than it first appears. Imagine asking a dog to sit, saying “good boy”, reaching for food, and paying him after he has stood up. If this happens regularly, the dog may reasonably conclude that good boy means the exercise is finished and he should come to collect his wages. We then describe him as unable to hold a sit, although he may be following the system exactly as he understands it.

Try separating the pieces. Ask for the sit, mark or praise while the dog remains there, and take the reward to him rather than encouraging him to leave the position. Wait a moment, reward again if you wish, then use the release word and move on together. Now success and permission to finish are two different pieces of information. This is particularly helpful for stays, settling on a bed and any exercise in which the dog needs to understand that reinforcement does not automatically end the job.

Marker words are not magic, nor do you need a complicated vocabulary. Three well-understood words are more useful than an impressive list used inconsistently. Decide which word promises a reward, which one encourages the dog to continue, and which one ends the exercise. Practise in a boring room before expecting the system to remain clear in the park.

Your body and the lead are talking as well

Words are only one part of the conversation, and often not the part a dog finds most convincing. Where we stand, where we look, what our hands are doing and how the lead feels all provide information. Dogs are exceptionally good at noticing these details, including the ones we did not realise we were offering.

On a walk, for example, you may see another dog before yours does and shorten the lead in anticipation. Your hand stiffens, your arm comes closer to your body, your pace changes and your attention fixes on the approaching dog. At the same time you say, “It’s fine.” The words are reassuring, but everything else in the message says that something important has appeared. This does not mean lead tension is the sole cause of reactivity, or that sensible handling involves giving a lunging dog six feet of freedom. It means that a short lead and a tight lead are not necessarily the same thing. You can reduce the available length for safety without maintaining constant pressure that adds urgency to the encounter.

The same contradictions appear in ordinary training. We call the dog while walking towards him, even though our movement may push him away. We ask for a down while looming over him. We say stay and then make the body movement that usually predicts the end of the exercise. We give a verbal cue and move a treat at the same moment, then credit the word when the dog was following the lure. Sometimes the physical help is intentional and entirely appropriate. The important thing is to know which part of the message the dog is responding to, so that help can be faded rather than becoming a permanent subtitle.

A useful test is to become deliberately boring for a minute. Choose a familiar behaviour, keep your hands neutral, avoid leaning, say the cue once and watch. If nothing happens, resist the urge to turn the moment into a confrontation. You have simply discovered that the dog’s understanding depends on another clue. Add enough help for success, reward it, and then work on making that help smaller over several easy repetitions. Training improves much faster when information is treated as information rather than evidence for the prosecution.

Protect the name, and say less when things are difficult

A dog’s name is one of the most frequently worn-out tools we possess. Ideally, I want it to mean something close to “pay attention; information is coming”. I say the name, the dog orients towards me, and then I can give a cue, move away or reinforce the check-in. Used that way, the name opens a small channel between us. Used as punctuation throughout the day — Billy, leave it; Billy, come on; Billy, what are you doing; Billy! — it soon becomes as noteworthy as the radio in the kitchen.

This matters most when owners repeatedly use the name to compete with something that has already captured the dog. Calling it five times while the dog stares at another dog rehearses a lesson we did not intend: the name can be ignored when the world is interesting. Sometimes the right answer is better training around milder distractions. Sometimes it helps to have a separate, neutral disruptor: a tongue click, a soft whistle or another harmless sound whose job is simply to prompt a brief pause and check-in.

A disruptor is not a correction and should not carry the emotional weight of “you are doing something wrong”. Nor is it a complete solution to a dog who is frightened, overexcited or already barking at the end of the lead. It creates a small opportunity. Make the sound in an easy setting; when the dog turns towards you, mark and reward. Build that response around modest distractions before trying to use it near something genuinely difficult. If the dog cannot respond, create distance rather than repeating the sound until it suffers the same fate as the name.

Human beings tend to talk more when we feel we are being understood less. A dog becomes excited and suddenly hears his name, no, leave it, look at me, sit, come on and it’s fine, while the lead tightens and food appears near his nose. This is a great deal of information for an animal whose capacity to process it has just fallen. As arousal rises, familiar behaviours become harder and attention narrows. That is usually the moment to simplify the conversation, not expand it.

Ask what the simplest useful message is. It may be a familiar cue followed by movement. It may be a marker at the instant the dog disengages. It may be a quiet turn away and enough distance for the dog to think again. At times it is simply management: cross the road, step behind a car, scatter a little food in the grass, or leave. Communication is not measured by the number of words we produce. In difficult moments, saying less often allows each part of the message to mean more.

“No” deserves the same scrutiny. For people it can mean stop, do not touch that, get down, come back, be quieter, or abandon whatever plan you have formed. That breadth may be obvious to us, but it is not a useful instruction to a dog unless the context and consequence make it so. If no merely expresses displeasure, the dog may know that we are unhappy without knowing what would make us happy instead. A clear interruption is more useful when it is followed by direction: come away from the bin, put four feet on the floor, leave that item, settle here. Boundaries are perfectly compatible with good communication; they work better when the dog can identify the behaviour that resolves them.

The conversation has to be worth joining

None of this is simply a matter of teaching a canine dictionary. A cue may be well conditioned and still struggle against the rest of the world if the dog has little history of finding the handler relevant. Relationship and engagement are sometimes described in rather mystical terms, but the practical version is straightforward: paying attention to you should regularly lead to useful things.

That might mean food, play, permission to sniff, movement towards something the dog wants, help out of an uncomfortable situation, or clear guidance when he is unsure. Engagement does not mean demanding eye contact for an entire walk. It means building enough good conversations that checking in becomes a worthwhile habit. A dog looks back at you and is released to sniff the hedge; he comes when called, receives a reward and is sometimes allowed to return to what he was doing. Listening does not always end the fun.

Trust also grows when our communication is fair. If a recall always predicts the lead going on and the walk ending, the dog learns something accurate but inconvenient. If the name is mostly used before a reprimand, orientation becomes a risky choice. If praise sometimes asks the dog to stay and sometimes releases him, hesitation is sensible. We make the conversation stronger by noticing these patterns and changing the history, not by demanding that the dog ignore what experience has taught him.

A practical communication audit

It is worth spending ten minutes watching one ordinary interaction as though it belonged to somebody else. Choose a walk, a doorway routine or a short training session and notice what you actually do, rather than what you intended to do. You do not need to correct everything at once. Look for one or two places where the message could become cleaner.

Start with the cue itself. Do you say it once, or does it usually arrive in a bundle of repeated words? Can the dog respond without seeing food or a large hand signal? Has the behaviour been practised in this setting, with this amount of distraction? If the answer is no, make the next repetition easier enough that you can teach rather than test.

Then look at the consequence. Does the dog know exactly which moment earned the reward? Are praise, a reward marker and a release doing separate jobs, or has one phrase come to mean all three? When you reward a stationary behaviour, does the dog remain in position until you release him? A minute spent clarifying those details can solve problems that otherwise look like poor impulse control.

Notice the silent parts of the exchange. Are your hands moving before the cue? Does lead pressure arrive at the same time as the word, or could the dog respond to the verbal information first? When you expect trouble, does your body announce it in advance? There is no virtue in pretending the lead does not exist, but it helps to use it deliberately and to recognise what it is telling the dog.

Finally, count how often you use the dog’s name and no. Could the name be protected as a prompt to orient? When you say no, can you follow it with information about what the dog should do instead? In excited moments, could you remove three unnecessary words, create a little space and use one familiar instruction well?

At the end of the audit, choose one small change and keep it for a week. Give the recall cue once and use the long line to help. Deliver rewards to the dog in position before releasing him. Say the name, reinforce the look, and stop using it as punctuation. Practise a neutral disruptor in the house. The aim is not to become robotic or to conduct every walk in silence; nobody wants to live with a handler who sounds like an instruction manual. It is to make the important words easier to distinguish from the cheerful human noise around them.

The next time a dog appears not to listen, stubbornness may still be part of the answer. So may excitement, fear, scent, tiredness or the simple fact that chasing a squirrel is more compelling than returning to us. But before settling on any of those explanations, check the conversation. Did we teach the cue clearly? Did our body support it? Did the dog know when he was right, and when he was finished? Was the request fair in that situation, and has listening to us generally proved worthwhile? Good communication will not remove every competing motivation, but it gives the dog a much better chance of understanding what we are asking. Often, that is where better training begins.

Eight things you can do straight away

If you want to make the conversation clearer today, start here:

• Choose three clear marker words. Decide which word promises a reward, which encourages your dog to continue, and which releases them from the exercise.

• Give a cue once. If your dog does not respond, make the situation easier or help them; do not teach them to wait for the fourth repetition.

• Let the word come first. Say the cue before moving your hand, reaching for food or applying lead pressure, so the dog has a chance to respond to it.

• Reward in position, then release. Take the reward to your dog when you want them to remain still, and use a separate release word when the exercise is finished.

• Protect your dog’s name. Use it to invite attention rather than as punctuation, and reinforce the simple act of turning to check in with you.

• Teach a neutral disruptor somewhere easy. Build a tongue click, whistle or other harmless sound at home before asking it to compete with real distractions.

• Follow ‘no’ with useful information. Interrupt when you need to, then show the dog what to do instead: come away, leave it, settle here or keep four feet on the floor.

• Say less when arousal rises. Use one familiar instruction, create distance and give the dog time to think rather than adding more words, pressure and movement.

If you would like to make your communication with your dog clearer, our Markers Masterclass Course is a practical next step. It will help you understand what your marker words should mean and how to use them consistently in everyday training. To find out more, or to ask whether the course is right for you and your dog, contact me at marc@muchadoaboutdogs.com.