8 Easy Ways to Train Your Puppy to Be Obedient in Short Time

My neighbor's kid has a dog that sits at the kitchen door and waits every single time. Doesn't beg, doesn't whine, doesn't lean on your leg. Just sits, with a tennis ball at his feet, until somebody opens the door.

I asked her how long that took.

She said it started with him being a bad dog.

I got the story later over a beer, and the short version is that it took about eight months of the boring kind of work, not the showy kind. Nobody filmed any of it. Nobody posted a thirty-second video of the dog going from wild to perfect. It was just a kid in a garage with a bag of treats and a dog who did not care about the bag of treats.

That story has been sitting in my head for a month, because it's the honest version of a title like this one, and the honest version is more useful than the promise.

Before we get into it, I should say what "short time" actually means here, because I think it gets misunderstood. Short doesn't mean days. It means repetitions, and the number of repetitions is way higher than you think, and the calendar is the part that fools you.

Here's what eight months of that garage work actually looks like, broken into pieces you can start this week.

Start With the Name and the Pay, Nothing Else

If you're starting from zero, this is the piece to do first, because a specific sound meaning food appears is the foundation. Everything else on this list gets built on top of it.

Mochi took three days to get it. Two of those days I clicked and she ignored me, because she was busy. On the third day she looked at me, and I dropped a piece of cheese on the floor, and that was the moment. Not because she learned something complex. Because she learned that I'm the source of the good stuff.

Three days for this one. Three days is the fastest anything on this list happens, and I promise you nothing else is that fast.

The mistake is teaching the name and then immediately asking for a behavior. Say the name, get a look, pay him, done. Twenty reps and stop while it's still boring. You want him bored of it, not good at it.

Sit Is the Cheapest One You'll Ever Teach

Here's the thing about sit. It's the first thing everyone asks a dog to do, and it's the only one where the dog is basically doing it by accident anyway.

Sit up, don't mean anything by it.

Then the next second, say the word and give him something. That's it. Dog happens to be sitting, word happens, treat happens. Repeat on a different floor, in a different room, at a different time of day. After maybe four days he'll start offering it before you ask, which is a problem you'll deal with later.

Four days. Maybe a week to feel reliable in one room, longer if you're doing it in a distracting place.

The mistake is repeating the word every single rep. If you say sit sit sit sit sit, you turn it into background noise, and background noise is the thing you're trying to avoid. Say it once, get the look, pay, and take five seconds doing nothing at all.

The Recall Is the Whole Game, and It Takes Longer Than You Think

This is the one that gets sold as a ten-minute job, and I want to be direct about it. Recall took me four months with Mochi and I'm not finished with it.

I mean that in a specific way. She comes reliably in the kitchen and in the yard, and she comes about half the time in a field next to a dog she doesn't like, which is a field she now has opinions about.

Here's what I did wrong for the first six weeks, and I do this every time I see somebody else do it, so it's worth naming. I trained the recall in my living room, on a rug, with no other dogs in the building. Basically I trained a dog to come to a word in a place where nothing was ever going to happen. Then I took her outside.

A recall only exists in the spot where you built it.

Once I understood that, the work got easier but got longer, because now every stage takes a week instead of a session. Indoors with no distractions, that's the easy one. Then the yard. Then a park at a distance. Then a park with other dogs visible. Each of those has a day where he decides the word isn't worth it, and you drop back a level and do that level again.

Four months and counting. I still wouldn't promise it works.

Loose-Leash Walking Is Mostly You, Not Him

This one costs nothing in equipment and takes almost no time, which is why people skip it and then wonder why their dog is a nightmare on a walk.

The most useful thing I did wasn't training Mochi anything. It was changing where I walk her. Narrow sidewalk, always on the same side, deadline pace. She learned to pull because the sidewalk taught her to pull.

The actual work is duller than that. Walk, stop, walk. Every time the leash goes tight, stop walking. Not a correction, not a word, not a marker. Just stop. Wait for her to loop back, then walk. Three or four of those in ten minutes and you're done for the day.

This is a two-week habit change for you and a near-zero change for the dog, at first. The improvement in her leash manners showed up somewhere around week three, which is later than I expected.

The mistake is the leash snap. It teaches her that pulling brings information. You want pulling to bring nothing, which is silence and a stationary human.

The Recall Reward Has to Be Worth More Than the Distraction

This is the one people get wrong by accident, because they train recall in a quiet house and then wonder why it collapses outside.

Everything your dog is currently looking at is more interesting than a treat. That's not a character flaw, that's just how a dog's brain works, and the treat has to beat the squirrel.

So here's what I do. I keep a handful of genuinely good stuff in my pocket during recall work. Not the training biscuits. The freeze-dried stuff, the cheese, whatever he actually loves. And I use all of it on recall and almost none of it anywhere else, so the word stays expensive.

This costs you money and it works faster than anything else I've tried. Three weeks of using premium treats only for recall changed her more than the previous two months of regular biscuits.

The mistake is using one fixed treat forever, for everything, everywhere. If the treat turns out during recall, nothing else in your pockets is going to work either.

Leave It Is Two Months of Boring, and It's the One That Saves Your Furniture

I did this one backwards and I'm not proud of it.

I left food on the counter and told myself I'd teach leave it later. What actually happened is that Mochi learned the counter is where interesting things appear, and by the time I started training she had opinions about the counter that were basically hostile.

Start it before there's anything to steal. Put a treat on the floor, hand near it, hand away. He moves toward it, you say the word and you pay him for stopping, even though he never got it. Over and over. The word means the treat lands on the floor, not in his mouth, and he will hate this for about a week.

Two months before it was solid, and I was inconsistent, which is a large part of why.

The mistake is picking a spot with a treasure on it. The kitchen is the hardest room in your house to do this in. Start in an empty room, or accept that your dog is going to fail there for a while.

The Crate Is Not a Punishment and the Docs Are Aggressive About It

Veterinary behaviorists are nearly universal on this one, and it comes up so often in the training aisles that it's worth stating plainly. A crate is a tool for sleep and for the eight hours you're at work. It is not where bad dogs go.

Mochi sleeps in hers through the night, which came after maybe six weeks of me sitting on the floor next to it at bedtime like an idiot, until falling asleep in there stopped being an event.

But the part people skip is the size. Too big, and you get a dog who has accidents because a sleeping puppy wakes up needing to go and can't make it outside. I bought the biggest one I could find, on sale, because I wanted him to be comfortable and last. I spent eleven days cleaning up after him.

Six weeks of bedtime work, eleven days of that mistake.

The mistake is using the crate as punishment. Dogs don't experience it as consequence. They experience it as a room where bad things happen sometimes, and then the room stops being restful for good.

The Last One Is Boring and It's the Whole Point

Put ten minutes a day into a puppy and a month into a dog, and the calendar will lie to you the entire time.

I didn't believe this until I started writing it down. Same ten minutes every morning, same kitchen, same five things to work on. Nothing new, no new tricks, no apps, no videos, no progress to look at. Then one morning about five weeks in, I walked into the kitchen and he came, sat, waited, and looked at me, all before I'd said anything at all.

I'd spent twenty seconds on it and I didn't notice. No photo of that morning, no party, no award for the person who trained him.

Five weeks of ten-minute sessions. That's the honest number and it's smaller than anything you'll read in a headline.

The mistake is adding something new every session because the old thing feels boring. Boring is the working state. If you're still bored, you're still in the part where it works.

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There's a tennis ball at the kitchen door of my neighbor's house, and it hasn't moved in a month, and I keep thinking about the video I never saw.

Mochi still steals socks. Mochi still pulls on the leash, just less. Mochi is eight months into this and she's not the dog at that kitchen door yet, and I've stopped expecting her to be, because the kid's dog took a year of something nobody posted about.

The thing I got wrong was believing those two things were different. The eight months of a kid in a garage and the eight tips on this page turned out to be the same work. Mine just happened in a kitchen instead of a garage, with a dog who's worse at holding a tennis ball than any dog I've ever seen.

Start tonight. Ten minutes, almost nothing in it, then again tomorrow. 🐾