Understanding training
How dogs actually learn
The 41 skills cover what to do. These are notes on why it works the way it does — and why a dog that is perfect at home falls apart in the park.
- Why your dog listens at home but not outside
A cue learned in the kitchen is a cue learned in the kitchen. What generalisation is, and why proofing is a separate job from teaching. · 7 September 2026
Why this exists
The 41 skill pages are instructions. They tell you what to do, in what order, and how to tell when a stage is solid enough to move on from. That is most of what anyone needs, and it is deliberately the bulk of the site.
What instructions do not do is explain why the thing works, and that turns out to matter. Nearly every owner who concludes their dog is stubborn, dominant, or spiteful has arrived there by way of a reasonable-sounding theory about what the dog was thinking. The theory is usually wrong, and it leads somewhere unhelpful — repeating a cue louder, adding pressure to a situation the dog cannot yet answer, or abandoning a method a week before it would have worked.
These notes are the other half. What a dog has actually learned when it learns a cue, why behaviour falls apart in a new place, why the timing of a reward matters more than its size, and why progress in training is mostly invisible — it shows up as things that stop happening.
Everything here is written to be checkable against your own dog. Where the honest answer is that something is unclear or contested, it says so rather than picking the tidier story. A method you understand survives a bad week; one you are following on faith does not.