How Long Does It Take to Train a Dog? (Wrong Question)

There's a dog who runs the golf course in front of our house, and Fleetwood knows exactly which door he comes out of.

The second we step outside… Fleetwood is looking for him. I can feel it before I can see it! His muscles go tight, and his whole body locks onto a spot in the distance where I haven't even found the other dog yet. Nothing else out there exists. That dog is the most interesting thing in Fleetwood's life.

And yet I can stand there with that dog in full view and call Fleetwood off him, and he comes. He's not thrilled about it 😆, but he turns and shows up anyway, because I asked.

That isn't just obedience. It's trust and obedience together, and it took months to build.

When people watch that happen, they almost always ask the same thing: how long do I train my dogs? It's the question trainers quietly brace for, because the real answer is never the tidy number people are hoping for.

Here's what I've landed on after fifty years of this. That one question has two different things buried inside it, and they are not the same animal at all. There's obedience, and there's training. In this house those are two separate words, and only one of them ever ends.

Obedience is the manners. Sit, wait, leave it, come when called. That part has a timeline, usually six to eight weeks around here, and then you have a dog who knows the rules of the house. Half the time I'm not even the one running it. Halo and Cherry potty trained Hudson and Erwitt for me and taught them their manners, just by being the steady older dogs in the room and showing the young ones how we do things.

A calm, well-mannered older dog is one of the best training tools you'll ever have, and it costs you nothing.

Training is everything that comes after that, and it doesn't end.

I have five Airedales, and each one shows me something different about what that means, so let me show you two of them side by side.

Start with Fleetwood and the golf course dog. The two of them get along fine. We made sure of that with proper introductions long before we ever had them out together. But getting along has done nothing to make that dog less fascinating. He's a standing appointment on Fleetwood's radar, every single day. We built that recall up over months, from basic manners all the way to holding steady around other dogs, kids, cars, the works. For Fleetwood, the training is the relationship. It's how he and I talk to each other, and he would do it all day long if I let him.

Now here's Erwitt. Same house, same standards, and a completely different story. Erwitt is trained and his manners are lovely, but he doesn't connect with me through the work the way Fleetwood does. He connects by patrolling the perimeter, checking in, and letting me know when he needs a little extra. That's just who he is. No amount of recall drilling was ever going to turn that into what Fleetwood and I have. With Erwitt, the real work was on my end: learning to read what he offers instead of asking him to be a dog he isn't.

Two dogs, one roof, identical training, and the honest answer to "how long" is completely different for each of them.

That's why the same number never fits. Obedience you can put on a calendar… but training is the ongoing back-and-forth of living with a dog who is always learning, from me and from the whole world, whether I'm running a session or not.

An older dog picks up a new habit, and I catch it and shape it before it sets. A young dog decides the clean laundry is a game, and I decide, today, whether that gets to continue. A behavior starts to drift, and I nudge it back. None of that is a course you finish. It's just paying attention for the entire life of the dog, and it turns out that's the biggest part of the bond, not a footnote to it.

The dogs who are easiest to live with are almost never the ones who aced a class. They're the ones whose owners simply never stopped training.

So how long do I train my dogs? The manners take a couple of months. The training takes the rest of their lives, and that's the part I wouldn't trade for anything!

Before you go, tell me one thing your dog has learned lately that nobody set out to teach them. Those are always my favorite ones to read.

-Kim Opdyke

💗