Eight behaviors carry almost all of daily life with a dog: attention, sit, down, stay, recall, leave it, drop it and a hand target. This course teaches them in order, using marker training (start with the marker page if the system is new to you), and proofs them with the three-dials rule until they work where life actually happens.
Every page in this section teaches reward-based training only. That is the position the American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior takes for all training and behavior work: teach with rewards, and do not use punishment, physical corrections, or shock, prong or choke collars. Where a problem is beyond home training (aggression, biting, escalating guarding, reactivity that is not improving, panic when left alone, or any sudden behavior change), our pages say so and route you to a veterinarian, a board-certified veterinary behaviorist (DACVB), a Certified Applied Animal Behaviorist (CAAB), or a credentialed trainer such as a CPDT-KA. That routing is not fine print; it is part of the method.
| Stage | Behaviors | Graduation check |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Attention | Name response, hand target | Dog looks or touches your hand within two seconds, in two rooms and the garden |
| 2. Positions | Sit, down | On word or signal, no lure visible, in three locations |
| 3. Recall foundations | Come indoors and on a long line outside | Turns and runs to you from 10 meters on a long line, low distraction (full ladder on the recall proofing page) |
| 4. Stay | Sit-stay and down-stay | 30 seconds with you three meters away, one dial raised at a time |
| 5. Impulse control | Leave it, drop it | Turns away from dropped food and trades a held item happily (full protocols on the leave it and drop it page) |
| 6. Real life | All of the above on walks, at doors, around visitors | The AKC Canine Good Citizen items are the benchmark: polite greetings, loose-leash walking, stay, a 10-foot recall, calm around dogs, and a 3-minute supervised separation |
Sessions are short: 2 to 5 minutes for puppies, 5 to 10 for most adults, up to 10 to 15 for eager high-trainability breeds, sized properly in the breed training planner. Work one behavior per session. Set up so the dog can win at least eight times out of ten; if the success rate drops, the step is too big. Pay every success while the behavior is new, and fade food gradually into praise, play and life rewards (the walk continuing, the door opening) as the cue becomes fluent.
Positions (sit, down). Lure with food in a closed hand, mark the instant the position happens, pay, then empty the lure hand within a few sessions so the gesture becomes a signal, then pair the word. Down is taught from sit for most dogs; large and deep-chested breeds sometimes learn it more comfortably from standing. If a dog resists down physically, check comfort before assuming attitude: hips and elbows talk.
Stay. Stay is duration, distance and distraction built separately onto a position the dog already knows. Release words matter: the dog holds until released, and the release is part of the behavior, paid like everything else. Build duration first at zero distance, then distance at tiny duration, then combine.
Attention. Attention is not a cue you add later; it is the substrate of the course. A dog who checks in voluntarily is a dog you can teach anything to. Pay check-ins you did not ask for, everywhere, for the first months. It is the highest-return habit in dog training.
Attention first (name response and hand target), then sit and down, then recall foundations, then stay, then leave it and drop it, with loose-leash skills running alongside from the start. The order matters less than the depth: a few cues that work in real life beat fifteen that only work in the kitchen.
More than feels reasonable, spread over days. Reliability is built from consistent, high-volume reinforcement, and one rewarded response barely moves the odds. Think in hundreds of easy, paid repetitions across the first weeks, in gradually harder places, rather than dozens of hard ones in an afternoon.
When the behavior is happening reliably. Teach the behavior first with a lure or by capturing, get it fluent, then pair the word just before the behavior, and only later use the word on its own. A cue attached to a behavior the dog does not yet understand is just background noise.
Distance (how far you are from the dog), duration (how long the behavior lasts) and distraction (what else is happening). Turn one dial at a time. If the dog fails twice, the last turn was too big: go back a step and rebuild. This rule runs everything in this course and in the breed training planner.
Because sit at home and sit at the park are, to the dog, almost different behaviors. Dogs do not generalize the way people hope; each new context needs its own short teaching pass at an easier level. That is normal learning, not stubbornness, and the fix is reps in new places at kitchen-level difficulty, not louder cues.
Both, in that order at first: dogs read body language more fluently than speech, so a clear hand signal teaches faster, and the word can be layered in once the signal works. Keep signals and words identical across everyone in the household; inconsistency is the most common home-training bug.