At Home Dog Training in Sydney, 32 Weeks and Older

You've tried the treats, the brain games and a dozen YouTube trainers with a magic fix, and nothing sticks. You're not doing it wrong. You're fixing the wrong thing. Your dog isn't broken.

What we actually get called for

Most of the work falls into a handful of patterns, and they share more than owners expect.

"Almost nobody calls me because their dog doesn't know what sit means," says Luke Buchanan, Owner of The Toe Beans Co and Sydney's Puppy Trainer. "They call me because there's a moment where their dog stops being able to hear them, and nobody has ever shown them where that moment starts."

Why your dog ignores you at the moment it matters

A dog that barks, pulls, jumps or snaps is almost always over threshold. Threshold is the point where arousal gets high enough that calm behaviour stops being available to them. It isn't that your dog doesn't know the command. They know it. They just aren't in a state where they can reach it.

This is what most training misses. A trainer arrives, starts drilling commands at a dog already sitting at the ceiling, and then calls it stubbornness when it doesn't work.

Think of a bad fear of flying, and being walked towards the plane while someone reads you the safety statistics. Every word is true. You still can't hear any of it.

Before you can train a dog you have to be worth listening to, and most of what looks like a training problem is really that. What I see in almost every session is a dog who'll turn and check in with their owner in the kitchen, and won't do it on the footpath with another dog forty metres away. Same dog, same word, different threshold. Once your dog chooses to turn to you when it's hard you've got something to work with, because now you can show them what you'd rather they did instead.

What the training actually is

It's the puppy program with the group class taken out entirely.

There is no class at this age and there shouldn't be. Your dog is years past the socialisation window that made a group room worth using, and the behaviour you called us about lives in your hallway, on your street and at your front door. It rarely travels to a hall. So all of it happens at your place instead.

Everything else stays. The online course, the support, and Ask Luke on hand at any hour.

Your first session runs two hours in your own home, and every session after that runs sixty to ninety minutes. You're in all of it. We watch first, because most of what we need turns up in the first twenty minutes. We find the cause rather than the behaviour, since treating symptoms is why the last four things you tried stopped working. Then you do it, not us, and we correct your timing until it's yours. Handling is a physical skill and it doesn't transfer by being explained.

Who this is for

• Dogs from thirty two weeks old, at any age after that
• Owners who have been told the behaviour is just who their dog is
• Rescue dogs settling into a house that isn't the one they learned in
• Dogs who were fine for years, until something changed in the house
• Anyone who has already tried a trainer and found the results didn't hold once they left

If your dog is under thirty two weeks you want Private Puppy Training instead. If they're sixteen weeks or under, puppy school and the puppy program is the right room, and it's worth getting into it quickly.

How we train

Force free, all of it. No shouting, no punishment, no pain, and nothing that works by hurting your dog.

An adult dog is exactly when owners get talked into the other approach, because the dog is bigger now and the behaviour is more embarrassing in public. A dog that complies out of worry hasn't calmed down, it has gone quiet. You've hidden the behaviour rather than resolved it, and it comes back, usually somewhere less convenient.

Where we work

Training happens in your home, anywhere in Sydney within roughly a forty-five minute drive of the Harbour Bridge. That covers the Eastern Suburbs, Inner West, North Shore, Northern Beaches, Hills District, Western Sydney and South Sydney.

Not sure whether your dog counts as a puppy or an adult? Book a free fifteen minute meet and greet and we'll tell you which one you're in.