Most of the training advice online is written for eight week old puppies. That is not much help when you have a three year old Kelpie who drags you down the street, ignores his name in the park, and barks at every dog he sees from fifty metres away.
You did not get here through neglect. Usually you got here because life happened, the puppy phase was survived rather than trained, and the behaviours quietly set.
This is the honest version of what fixing that looks like in an adult dog.
The honest truth first
Adult dog training is a marathon, not a fix.
With a puppy you are writing on a blank page. With an adult dog you are writing over the top of something. Every time your dog has pulled on the lead and still got to the tree, pulling worked. Every time it barked at a dog and the dog went away, barking worked. Those are not bad habits. They are trained behaviours with a few thousand successful repetitions behind them.
That is why we will not tell you a number of sessions. Anyone who tells you an adult reactivity case takes four weeks is guessing.
What we will tell you is that the direction of travel becomes obvious quickly. If the plan is right, you see something shift in the first fortnight. Not solved. Shifted. That is the signal to keep going.
What "the socialisation window closed" actually means
The socialisation window closes at six months, which is twenty four weeks. Your adult dog is well past it. Owners hear that and read it as a life sentence.
It is not. Here is what it actually changes.
Before six months, a puppy meets something new and files it under "normal" almost for free. After six months, that filing cabinet is largely written. New things get compared against what is already in there, and if what is in there says "unfamiliar dogs are a threat", that is the frame every new dog gets judged against.
So the job changes shape. With a puppy you are building associations. With an adult dog you are building new ones alongside the old ones and making the new ones more reliable. That takes longer and it needs more careful setup. It does not stop working.
The dogs we see improve most are frequently adults. They have more history, and they also have a longer attention span and better impulse control than any twelve week old puppy ever had.
Recall in an adult dog
Adult recall is where owners have usually done the most accidental damage, and it is also where the quickest wins live.
The damage is almost always one of two things. Calling the dog repeatedly until it comes, which teaches it that the first six calls mean nothing. Or calling the dog and then doing something it does not like, such as putting the lead on and going home, which teaches it that coming back ends the fun.
The rules we run are deliberately strict.
Call once. One call. That is it. If you find yourself saying the name a third time, the word has already stopped meaning anything.
If it does not come, walk away. Do not repeat, do not chase, do not plead. Walk off and wait five minutes.
Do not reward it if it wanders over later. If your dog strolls back three minutes after ignoring you, that is not recall. Rewarding it teaches a delay is acceptable. Be pleasant and neutral, and try again later when you have set it up properly.
For the practice itself, a long line does the work. Ten metres, always on a harness, never on a collar. The line is not there to reel the dog in. It is there so the dog cannot self-reward by running off, which means every rep you run is a rep that goes your way. As recall becomes reliable, reduce the line in one metre increments. Not five metres to nothing.
There is more detail in the full guide to dog recall training, and the poor or no recall page covers how we work it in a session.
Loose-lead walking, and why yanking never worked
Pulling is the most misunderstood one, because the standard response makes it worse in a way that is invisible.
A dog that pulls is a dog that has learned pulling moves it forward. Every single walk where the dog pulled and the walk continued was a training session in pulling. Yanking back on the lead does not change that equation. It adds discomfort to a behaviour that is still being paid, and a dog that is excited enough will take the discomfort and keep pulling. That is how you end up with a dog that pulls harder into a tight collar.
What changes it is making pulling stop working. The lead goes slack and you move. The lead goes tight and you stop, or you change direction. It is slow, it is boring, and your first few walks will cover about two hundred metres. That is the price.
Two practical points. Use a harness, so that the pressure that does occur is not landing on a throat. And separate the two jobs: a walk for exercise and a walk for training are different outings at the start, because you cannot train loose lead on a walk you also need to finish in twenty minutes.
The technique is set out in full in how to teach loose lead walking, and the calm walk blueprint covers the adult version.
Reactivity is the long lane
If your dog lunges and barks at other dogs on the lead, this is the one that takes the longest and the one where shortcuts do the most harm.
The behaviour is nearly always fear or frustration rather than aggression. Your dog sees something it cannot cope with, it cannot move away because it is on a lead, so it makes a noise to make the thing go away. The thing goes away, because you both walked past. It worked.
The work is unglamorous. You find the distance at which your dog notices another dog but can still take food and still hear you. That distance is often much further than owners expect, sometimes eighty metres. You work there, you pay attention to the moment your dog looks and then chooses to look back at you, and you close the distance in small steps over weeks.
The thing that wrecks this is going too close too early because a good day made you brave. One bad rehearsal costs you a fortnight.
We have written up the full method in the force-free recovery method for reactive dogs.
Two things we do not use, ever: prong or check collars, and shock collars. Nothing in our work involves pain, fear, force or punishment. We have set out exactly what that commitment rules out in what force-free actually means.
Where a consequence is needed, it is a timeout. For an adult dog that means five to twenty minutes in a quiet, boring room. Never outside, and never the crate. The crate is a place your dog should want to be, and turning it into a punishment costs you a safe space you will need later.
What sending your dog away will not fix
Owners at the end of their tether ask about board and train regularly. It is a reasonable thing to want.
Here is the mechanical problem with it. Your dog does not pull on a lead. Your dog pulls on a lead held by you, on your street, past your triggers, at the end of your working day. Behaviour is not stored in the dog like a file. It is a relationship between the dog, the environment and the handler.
A dog can come back doing beautiful work for the person who trained it and revert inside a week, because the person on the other end of the lead has not changed anything. The training that lasts is the training you learn to do.
That is the whole reason our behaviour work runs in your home. Sessions are 60 to 90 minutes, except the first session for a dog 32 weeks and older, which runs two hours because there is a lot of history to work through.
Behaviour and commands are two different jobs
Worth saying plainly, because it explains why the plan looks the way it does.
Commands are taught with positive reinforcement. Sit, drop, stay, come, heel. Mark the behaviour, pay it, repeat it, add difficulty.
Behaviour is different. Reactivity, guarding, anxiety, the dog that will not settle. Those are not missing commands and you cannot reward your way out of them. They come from how the dog reads its position in your household and how it copes. That work runs through the Relational Leadership framework, which is about the daily structure around the dog rather than drills.
Most adult cases need both, in that order. Structure first, then skills.
When at-home is right, and when it is not
At-home 1:1 is the right call when the behaviour happens at home or on your own street, when your dog cannot cope in a group yet, or when the issue is specific to your household.
A group setting is the better call when your dog is broadly fine and you want polish around distraction, or when the missing piece is genuinely other dogs.
If your dog has bitten a person and broken skin, say that on the first call. That changes the assessment and it changes what we recommend, and it is not something to work around quietly.
FAQ
My dog is five years old. Is it too late?
No. Five year old dogs learn perfectly well. What changes with age is not the ability to learn, it is the amount of practice the unwanted behaviour has already had. Expect it to take longer than it would in a puppy, and expect it to work.
What if my dog has already been through training that used corrections?
Tell us what was used and how your dog responded. What we look for is whether the dog has learned to go quiet around a particular person or piece of equipment without actually feeling any better, because that changes where we start. We rebuild from structure and reward, we go slower at the beginning, and we do not use aversive equipment at any point.
How many sessions does it take?
We are not going to invent a number. A specific issue in an otherwise settled dog is often a short piece of work. Established reactivity is months, not weeks. What we will do on the first call is tell you honestly which of those two you are looking at.
Start with the free Meet and Greet. Fifteen minutes on the phone, and you will get a straight answer about what your dog needs.
Full details on adult dog behaviour training in Sydney, or go straight to at-home behaviour training.
If your dog is younger than this, the adolescent stage guide and why your six month old forgot its training are the more useful reads.
