10/11/2026
It has been some time since I wrote anything on dog behavior, but an incident the other night prompted me to write this.
My family was invited to a church friend’s house, along with a few other families, for a pizza party. The hosts are a wonderful couple from our parish. The dad is a very smart guy whom I like a lot, and the mom is quiet and sweet. They have seven-year-old twins and a four-year-old boy. Guess what they got to bring "peace and calm" to their lives… a Goldendoodle puppy.
Now, they know I’ve made my living training dogs, but they had never seen me work. When I am in a room with a dog—any dog—it is hard to keep myself from correcting their behavior, at least within my personal space. Meaning, if they come toward me and jump, or are otherwise acting crazy, I step in.
The dad brought the puppy inside from the yard to find a house full of people. Talk about overstimulated. He mentioned he was going to put the dog in his crate in another room, at least while we were eating. I told him he would be missing out on a great training opportunity, so we left the puppy out.
When he put the dog on the ground, it tore around the room, greeting the kids on the floor and the adults sitting on the couches. His butt was shaking so wildly I thought he might break a hip. When he got to me, he began to jump on my leg. I immediately corrected him with a quick touch of my finger behind his ear, simulating what a higher-ranking dog would do. He immediately sunk to the floor, turned around, and gave me his rear end, showing his submission. As fast as I gave the correction, I followed up with praise—slowly petting his back from head to tail and offering a quiet, “Good boy.”
For the rest of the night, whenever he did anything I intuitively didn’t like—from sniffing around food to jumping on someone else—I would make my correction noise, a sort of “aight” sound. The puppy would immediately stop, look back at me, make eye contact, and come over to give me his back. It also made every person in the room stop what they were doing and look at me.
After a while, I stopped and just watched to see if the dad would take over. Whenever the puppy—again overwhelmed by the smells of food and fast-moving kids—did something undesirable, the dad would make different noises, yell the dog’s name, or flail his arms. The dog's response was to look at him, ignore it, and continue the behavior.
In a room full of dogs, a person is going to recognize another person first. In a room full of people, a dog is going to look for another dog first. That is their best option to interpret the environment and figure out where they fit. All I did was introduce myself as a human who spoke and communicated in "dog." I introduced myself as the boss. This has always been the basic principle of MCS and Focus Based Canine Training.
Sometimes I feel like John Edwards talking to the dead for people. It all seems mysterious to them, perhaps because it is actually so simple. We say we want simple, but only if it doesn’t require consistency—because being consistent is something humans absolutely suck at.
Look at it from the dog’s point of view: they took him away from the best pack leader he will ever have, his mother, and brought him into a house with two adults and three crazy kids who act like primates, not dogs, and speak a totally different language. There was no change-of-command ceremony. Nobody identified themselves as the leader, except for the dad, who seems to take care of him most of the time but does so using human logic.
Later on, I was talking to the dad. We get along well, and I gave him some basic advice. But as usual, he started explaining what he was doing and why it made sense to him—as a human. I didn’t want to ruin the night by being "that guy," so I let it drop, but I will get back to him soon.
A dog that does not look at you when things are calm will not hear you in chaos. Chaos can take many forms. For a police canine, it's running after a bad guy. For most pet owners, it is a dog darting out the open front door.
Currently, besides my day job, I am writing a book on a different subject, but I am going to try to start writing more of this “dog stuff” again.
