Building the right relationship with your dog.

Here’s a question – what does a healthy relationship with your dog look like? Should your dog love you? Should they be excited to see you when you get home? Should your dog respect you? Should your dog be obedient to your commands? What about trust – should your dog trust you? Should your dog know that you can keep them safe, and make decisions that will be beneficial to them out and about in the real world? And of those three qualities – Love, Trust and Respect (the fundamental building blocks which Cesar teaches for all people and dogs) – which is the most important, if any? And how many do you practice?

As a professional behaviourist, it might surprise you to hear that of these three qualities, the one that is most often missing is trust. I can say gladly and with confidence that the majority of my clients love their dogs – and when it comes to the debate in most families, the conversation often centres around dogs that love but don’t respect their owners, vs dogs that respect but don’t love their owners. Trust often goes unnoticed, and it is one of the key contributing factors in many of the reactivity cases that I work with. Trust is also a two way street – and if you feel that you don’t trust your dog, whether that is to behave in a calm and social way with people or other dogs, or you don’t trust them to come back when they are off a lead, or you don’t trust them to relax when they are left on their own, trust more than either of the other two qualities is the thing that people miss the most.

So how do you gain a dogs trust? Well, in my opinion it comes down to three things. The first and most important is what I’ve already mentioned – that your dogs know you will keep them safe. Which means being able to manage their space and the environment for them, so that they don’t feel the need to defend themselves from threats and dangers. The second is being emotionally consistent, and predictable in the way you behave. Dogs thrive on consistency, and one of the easiest ways to erode trust is to behave in an unpredictable or inconsistent way with your dog. If a dog never knows how you are going to react – what rules you are going to implement, how you will respond to certain behaviours, or at what point you may lose your temper or have an emotional breakdown – they will learn very quickly not to trust you. The third way that you can build trust with your dog is by learning to speak their language, instead of expecting them to learn yours. Dogs have their own psychology, their own forms of communication, their own needs and drives – and dogs that have human beings which can read and respond them are far more likely to succeed and trust people than dogs who feel that their communication and signals are being ignored.

Trust is overwhelmingly the most important part of how I teach my dogs and my client dogs. Love and respect are often areas of focus too – affection at the right time to promote the right state of mind, and Respect for safety in a human world – but trust is the thing which most relationships lack, and the thing that we spend the most time teaching.