13/08/2026
Barbara says:
Someone asked me the other day, "When your dog runs off towards another dog, what command should I use?"
Err... I don't know. How about banana?
They laughed. Then they told me it was the best advice they'd gotten all day. I said I'd bang my head against a tree, and somehow that landed better than any real answer I could have given.
I know this sounds like I wasn't taking it seriously. I was. I know exactly how serious it is when your dog does a thing like that.
But I sometimes feel like people assume dogs come preloaded with certain commands. Say this word and your dog will come to you. Make this sound and your dog will never do this terrible thing again.
You and I know that's bu****it.
What is true is that we can teach our dogs to attach meaning to certain words or signals, and the better we teach them, the more reliably they'll respond. That's what dog training is all about. It's communication. But communication isn't just about exchanging signals or understanding the code. It's also about how we feel.
Here's an example. Insects are buzzing in the midday sun and Stevie is chasing them. She's incredibly quick, darting this way and that on nimble legs, eyes locked on her prey. So much focus.
The more she gets into it, the less she notices me. I might not even be here for all that she's looking at. I can almost hear the buzzing inside her head, bzzzzz, like the flies she loves to chase. I can't get her attention. She's so focused on those insects I can't even see them. Are they even there?
A dog that's focused on something else isn't ignoring you out of stubbornness. They're somewhere else entirely, and their body is doing exactly what their nervous system is telling them to do. No word was ever going to reach them there. Not because they don't know it, but because in that moment, the word has nowhere to land.
So what do we do instead?
For me, it comes down to relationship and engagement. My dogs want to engage with me because it pays off for them. They get rewarded a lot, and they have fun with me. Long before I need a word to mean something in a moment like the one with Stevie and the insects, I've spent a long time building the reason she'd even look for me in the first place.
This matters most for those of us with reactive dogs, because the stakes feel so high. We worry our dog will get away from us. We're afraid of embarrassing ourselves in front of others. We're afraid our dog will get hurt, or hurt another dog. Those fears are real, and they're exactly why "just say this word" advice falls so flat. It promises a fix for a moment when what actually needed fixing was built long before that moment ever arrived.
So no, there's no magic banana. There's no quick fix waiting to be discovered. There's only the relationship you've been building, one bit of trust at a time, so that when the world gets very loud inside your dog's head, there's still a thread connecting them back to you.
What's your version of "banana"? The word or phrase that gets a laugh but not much else when things go sideways? Tell me in the comments, I bet we've all got one.
