Training doesn't stop when the lessons do

We get numerous questions regarding house training, or behaviour correction. Particularly for the former we offer advice, and we get told 'yes we have done that already, and she goes to the toilet in the correct place 90% of the time'. This means your dog isn't house trained at all, so you need to continue the training. Then with behaviour problems, we get the same answer, 'i've taught her that already'. Fixing problems requires consistency, you have to do what the training involves going forward, not just

train and forget about it. If you return to doing what you were originally doing, then you can expect the dogs behaviour to return to its original problem behaviour.

The simplest way to explain it i think is like this. If your dog is misbehaving because he is bored, you fix it by curing the boredom. Eventually the new games, toys etc will lose their appeal. The dog will become bored, the bad behaviour will return. The ongoing goal is to keep the boredom at bay. If you make a schedule for the dog and she 100% of the time pees outside, she is house broken. If you break the schedule the dog will no longer go to the toilet only outside, you need to maintain what worked. The training teaches you what to do, you have to do it going forward.