04/10/2026
There are 4 stages to teaching a dog a behaviour.
I’ll use “Come” as an example.
1. Acquisition - The Dog learns that “Come” means return to their owner and be rewarded for doing so.
2. Fluency - Every time the Dog hears “Come” they return to their owner and they don’t require any help to do so.
3. Proofing (Discrimination/Generalisation) - Through training “Come” in many different environments and around all sorts of distractions the Dog learns that they must return to their owner in all situations.
4. Management - Throughout the Dogs life we do occasional training sessions to work on “Come” and keep the behaviour strong and reliable. Sometimes the reliability starts to fade so we do some more intensive training to make it strong again.
Most people get stuck at the 1st stage and then try jumping past the 2nd and 3rd stages and wonder why their dog doesn’t listen around distractions. Doing some recalls at home or at classes and then going straight to the dog beach and wondering why your dog isn’t coming back is a failure in training, not the dog being disobedient.
Or many owners will work hard and get all the way to the 4th stage but let all of that hard work come undone by not maintaining the behaviour and continuing to do little training sessions on it to keep it strong.
The last piece I will point out is around reaching the fluency stage. If you have to use a hand lure or hand signals to get your dog to do a command, you have not reached the fluency stage. And this is especially important for something like the recall, because your dog is not going to come back to you unless they are looking at you. And you will wonder why they won’t come back and get grumpy with them, but you have not taught them what “Come” means, you have taught them that throwing your hands up in the air means to return to you, which is useless if your dogs too busy chasing a bird or running towards another dog.
So it’s an important question to ask yourself. Have I really taught my dog to understand what I am asking of them? Or is our training incomplete?
