• Nadine Whittal, dog trainer writes:

Most of us adopt dogs, not because we want to train and enter them in competitions, but because we want them as companions. With that in mind, most people will only train their dogs up to a certain point. They want to make their dogs acceptable to society and teach them a bit of obedience for those odd times it may be needed.

So how do we decide if a dog is acceptable to society? At McKaynine Randfontein, we generally suggest you train your dog up to the point of Canine Good Citizen (CGC) Bronze level. By this point, your dog has learnt to be polite around other dogs and people, and has learnt to handle various distractions. That being said, I do believe that there are obedience commands that surpass others in importance.

I refer to these as our emergency commands and are often the difference between your dog living a happy and healthy life, and your dog getting severely injured.

The first emergency command is for your dog to come when you call, no matter what the circumstance. This is called a recall. You need to ensure that your dog can be running flat out after a rabbit or something equally as entertaining and you can call your dog back to you without too much trouble. This means training recalls from puppies, and making them as fun and rewarding for your dog as possible. That way they learn that the fun stuff happens around you.

The second emergency command is for your dogs to stay where you tell them to stay. If your dogs are running towards you, and all of a sudden a snake pops up between you and them, telling your dogs to stay might save their lives. The stay is a trust exercise. Your dogs need to trust that when you tell them to stay, you will come back to them at some point.

The third emergency command is to teach your dog to ‘leave it’. This is fairly self-explanatory, as you want to be able to tell your dog not to pick up that dodgy piece of food a stranger just threw over the fence, or not to eat the dead bird over there. This is something you should learn in puppy class and continue to practice for the rest of your dogs’ lives.

The rest of the training is ‘nice to have’ to impress people and make your dog that much easier to handle in daily life.