What a twelve-week obedience course actually covers

Course length is the main thing that separates trainers locally. Six weeks is common. Twelve is on the long end, and the difference is not more commands, it is more proofing.

How the course starts

There is a walking session about a week before the course begins, for owners and dogs, so you can feel how changing the walk begins to change the dog. Then a three-hour lecture for owners only, which is the one meeting dogs do not attend. It covers why dogs do what they do and what the household has to agree on before anything else works.

The lecture is the meeting people try to skip and the one that decides whether the rest of the course lands. If three people in a house are giving three different instructions, the dog learns that the rules depend on who is holding the leash.

Weeks one to four: the mechanics

• Walking on a loose leash, in the room and then outside it.
• Sit, down and stand, with a hand signal as well as a word.
• Stay, introduced with distance and duration separately rather than together.
• Coming when called, on a long line, with the distractions built up deliberately.

None of this is exotic. That is the point. These are the exercises that decide what daily life with the dog feels like, and they are the ones almost every owner has already tried and half-taught at home.

Weeks five to nine: adding the hard parts

This is where duration, distance and distraction get layered in. A stay at three feet for ten seconds becomes a stay across the room for a minute, with another dog walking past. Recall becomes recall from a sniff. The exercises look the same and behave completely differently.

Weeks ten to twelve: proofing in the real world

The last stretch takes the exercises out of the room and into a park, or a street, with real dogs and real people. This is the part that cannot be done at home and cannot be done by watching a video. A dog that has only practised in a training room has not practised.

Your part of it

Twenty to thirty minutes a day. Short sessions, most days, in more than one room of the house. Owners who do this get a trained dog, and the ones who do not, do not, and no trainer can do it for them. That is the honest version of what you are buying.

How to tell whether it is working

• The walk changes first, usually in the first couple of weeks, because it is the thing you do every day.
• Then the household: jumping up, counter-surfing, ignoring you.
• Then it holds under pressure, around other dogs and in unfamiliar places.

If nothing has changed by the end of week four, say so in the room. That is a two-minute conversation and usually a small technique problem rather than a dog problem.