07/31/2025
Great insights for any breed of dog?
GOT A TRICKIER COLLIE TO TRAIN? Today our breed expert Carol Price looks at:
BORDER COLLIE TRAINING - WHAT GOES WRONG AND WHY?
One of the greatest myths about Border collies is that are always 'easy to train’. When what they really are, for the most part, is exceptionally fast learners. This means they can learn all the 'wrong' things just as rapidly as the 'right' ones, unless we more skilfully take control of the whole learning process in our dogs, from as early on in their lives as possible.
Collies are also very speedy 'ingrainers'. In that once they have learned or discovered a particular type of behaviour that brings some reward for them, they may more stubbornly wish to retain it, or find it harder to abandon this preferred behaviour in favour of some newer one you want them to learn.
BREED VARIETY
Of course collies, as in all aspects of their behaviour, can vary greatly in how responsive they are to what you want them to learn or do in training, and genetics can certainly play a part in this. In that dogs from some more classic Obedience or other working lines tend to have been more deliberately selected for their higher learning ability and responsiveness and keener desire to both please and co-operate with a handler or owner. As well as the ability to maintain higher focus on an owner or their commands through surrounding distractions.
And if you do not happen to have a dog like this you may find the notion that they “should be easy to train” all the more frustrating. Especially if you have had a previous collie – or collies – who were far more responsive than your current one.
However, as with better resolving any collie issue, you have to begin with a greater understanding of how different these dogs can all be as individuals, including how they are psychologically motivated. And what may work for one collie in training may not work for another. Thus you always have to adapt the style of your training to the more individual mind of your dog.
SENSITIVE DOGS
Some collies, for instance, can be exceptionally sensitive to any kind of mental pressure exerted by an owner - even if you may just class this yourself as ‘encouragement’. The super sensitive dog is motivated predominantly by a desire to remain within a specific sensory comfort zone, and cannot cope too well when pushed too far beyond it.
Thus any form of louder, harsher or more pressurising voice tone or body language in training, or even just some more obvious sense of disapproval or disappointment displayed by you about their behaviour, may crush them or make them mentally shut down and withdraw from further interaction with you. A reaction that too often gets interpreted by an owner as the dog just being 'stubborn' or ‘disobedient’. At which point more pressure gets applied, and the ‘shut down’ problem then just gets worse and worse or more progressively ingrained.
Dogs like these really need the lightest of touches in training, and the calmest and most sympathetic forms of handling. Everything they do is right, and clever, and gets your approval. It is just that some things - i.e. the things you want them to do most - are always more clever than others, and bring them the highest rewards. Dogs like these may also always thrive most being trained one-to-one, rather in a group training environment. But once you get the approach right, they really can be a joy to train.
CONTROL RESISTANT DOGS
One of the hardest type of collie to train – and which I have written about before on this page - is the dog more psychologically resistant to being controlled. I.e. dogs who are predominantly motivated by a desire to both exert and retain control, and never surrender this feeling of control, over their own actions or movements, to others.
Dogs like these seem to constantly have their own more ‘personal agenda’ into which they resent anyone intruding, or trying to make them do something else. And it always tends to be the exercises that require a dog to surrender greater control to you of their actions, movements or space (like down and stay or wait or speedier recalls on command, or walking beside you more slowly on the lead) that will typically cause the greatest levels of resistance.
Often, however, these problems date back to the very early basic building blocks of your training, where you teach all puppies that responses like focus and co-operation will consistently bring them the highest rewards in life, and they are also given the opportunity to more actively choose these responses for themselves, rather than have them imposed on them with some greater sense of pressure. It is also important to realise that control resistant dogs cannot help the way they are psychologically wired, and are thus not acting from any more conscious sense of 'defiance' or refusal to 'respect' you.
Dogs like these will always need a higher level of patience and persistence to train, as well as a constant sense that whatever you ask them to do will carry far higher rewards for them than not doing it. Ultimately you just have to learn to think more like them, and work out what would most motivate you to do what someone else asked if you had their kind of psychology. Which is actually a basic principle you should apply to the training of all dogs.
PERSONAL ‘BAGGAGE’
Another really common reason for poorer responses to training in our dogs is the reality that we too often bring our own emotional/psychological baggage into the whole training process – often without realising it.
Things like our own lower sense of confidence, or – as previously outlined – a sense that our dog does not ‘respect’ us enough, or we may just be too impatient or unrealistic, when it comes to what we expect from our dogs, given the quality of guidance we are giving them, or the amount of time we are giving them to learn something new and then retain it. Dogs should also always be allowed to make mistakes without fearing the consequences of making them (in terms of our more negative reactions). As an ongoing fear of the consequences of doing something ‘wrong’ is also one of the commonest motivation and confidence crushers in collies.
The greatest lesson I ever learned about training dogs is that it is all about what THE DOG needs, not YOU. You must take all your ego and baggage out of the equation, and just focus entirely on how you are going to not only motivate your dog to learn doing different things for you, but also LOVE doing them.
This feature has just given you some common examples of how a collie's innate psychology may clash with the way they are being trained. But there are so many other quirks of collie personality, or thought process, that can make your training fail for the same reason. These are all covered in far greater depth - along with more extensive advice on what to do about it - in BOOKS TWO and THREE of my BREED APART trilogy:
All text ©Carol Price/Collieology 2025
Carol Price collie books: In the UK from: https://performancedog.co.uk/?s=carol+price In the USA from: https://www.dogwise.com/ # and https://www.cleanrun.com/product/border_collies_a_breed_apart_book_1_secrets_of_the_working_mind/index.cfm In Canada from https://4mymerles.com/collections/books In Australia from: https://gameondogs.com.au/ And in the Netherlands and Belgium from: https://mediaboek.nl/border-collies-a-breed-apart-book-1.html
