How do you deal with an unpredictable dog than can nicely perform obedience exercises but in the next few minutes just runs away without saying 'good bye!'?

Question

Dear Ed,

    How do you deal with an unpredictable dog than can nicely perform obedience exercises such as send away with jump over hurdle, make weave poles without assistance, quick down on the table 30M from his handler and the next few minutes just runs away without saying 'good bye!' ?

    This is the case of my friend's G.S (1yr old). She was trained together with a labrador and one day she suddenly reacted strangely by running away. Usually she is quite scared of Rottweilers and it seems that she took the labrador for one.

    To summarize, she is always reacting unpredictably. Like for instance, usually she was undisturbed by children with rollers and one day she reacted differently and was quite affected by those and just like another example where she is usually undisturbed by a couple of stray dogs and one day she suddenly decided to chase them which of course never happened before and during training sessions. We tried to reproduce the same situation using a long leash this time but she knows that she is not free and does not react to provocations. What must I do to solve that instability problem? Please reply as soon as possible as this is very dangerous. Last time she crossed a road chasing stray dogs and we thought it was over, fortunately it wasn't. So we can't trust her when it comes to obeying and it happens just like that with no particular signs or events.

    Thank you for your kind consideration,
Lilia

Accepted Answer

I would have to say first that a one year old dog doing all of those exercises off leash seems to be rushing the dog a lot in training. I’m not saying that this is the case with your friends dog, but in order to get the kind of control and precision required to work all those exercises at a distance there needs to be either a lot of time spent training or pressure put on the dog. A one year old dog is not ready to do all of those things over and over, off leash and with the distractions of other dogs in my experience.

I would say that the dog is reacting to the amount of stress she’s feeling during training, and she doesn’t know how to communicate this so she leaves.

The easy thing is to keep this dog on a line and do not allow this behavior to continue happening. I would be using marker training and making things really fun for her. Also, if she is not spayed she may be having some hormonal fluctuation and in some females it can cause erratic behavior. Here is the article on Markers. I would back up the training and work on building the basics, because if the dog won’t stay with the handler then all the other exercises don’t mean much.

I don’t know what the goals are with this dog, but she’s young and there is plenty of time to work off leash later. When dogs react differently off leash than they do on leash, then it means you have “trained” the dog to know the leash controls her, not the handler.

Cindy