It’s a myth that you can't start teaching a dog until he's six months old. By the time a puppy is that age, he's well into the hormonal beginnings of adolescence and that can add a challenge to training. That's not to say that six-month-old puppies can’t be trained — they can! But if you're reading this and have an eight-week-old puppy chewing on your shoe, you should know that starting now will fast-track your training AND save your shoes.

The oldest dog that has come to me for training was a ten-year-old golden retriever. When the owners brought him to class, the first thing I asked was “What made you decide to train this dog at ten years of age?” The answer was that the dog had been a chronic jumper for his whole life, but two weeks earlier he had jumped on their grandmother and she had broken her hip. They decided that the dog had to be trained or had to go.

The secret of dog training is that the dogs can be trained fairly quickly — it’s the owners that may take a little longer to train. Or un-train! In this case, the owners needed to learn that because they came into the house yelling “Oh, Pookie-bear, where are you?” the dog had learned to be overly excited whenever the door was opened. They also needed to learn that when the dog jumped they should say "Off" and not "Down," because we teach "Down" to mean lie down and "Off" to mean get off. I knew the family with the golden would be easy to train because they were very motivated to stop his jumping problem. But, they had to remember that the dog had been jumping for ten years, so the solution wasn’t going to happen overnight. The family had to learn a new way to greet the dog, and the dog had to learn that the old behavior was unacceptable. After a month, they reported that the behavior had stopped! They knew that they could never go back to their old ways, or the behavior would return immediately.

The answer to that age-old question is "YES! You can teach an old dog new tricks — as long as its owners are willing to learn, too!"



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