The Difference Between Dog Obedience Training and Behavior Modification

A lot of people get these two confused. They don't even know there's a difference at all, and they don't know that there's many different types of dog training, so I want to clear that up. It's particularly important for puppies because we have a specific format that we use, focusing on the foundational skills of young puppies. We want to avoid making it too complicated or too intense at the beginning. 

Obedience training is also known as dog training, which involves teaching basic commands such as sit, down, stay, come, bed or place, leave it, and drop it for impulse control. It teaches leash training and socialization skills,  and can work on minor behavior problems such as jumping or play biting, which a lot of puppies do. That's typically a basic obedience program, and you can make it more intermediate or advanced by adding other things to it like the AKC Canine Good Citizen training and testing, which gets the dog ready a high level of socialization. 

Obedience training is what most people think about when they talk about training a dog, and most of the times, even vets will just say dog training as a general term for helping the dog with everything. For example, if you bring your puppy to the vet and it's very mouthy, very aggressive, it's got a lot of fear, anxiety, or other serious unwanted behaviors, the vet will say, “you need to find a trainer. This dog needs some training,” and that's absolutely incorrect. The dog doesn't need any training because training is sit down, stay come, etc. What it needs, is Behavior Modification. 

Behavior modification, also called BeMod, is a systematic approach to change unwanted severe behaviors such as fear, anxiety, stress, or aggression. And this can come in many forms. This can be fear of sounds, fear of moving objects, anxiety to being separated from you, anxiety in public, anxiety of riding in the car. It can be dog to dog aggression, dog to people aggression, resource guarding, meaning guarding their food or toys or house or car, or even the owners. So there's many different forms of fear, anxiety, stress, and aggression. All of those four serious behaviors need behavior modification. 

You can't control, fix, or resolve, serious behavior problems using obedience training, but obedience training can help facilitate the behavior modification.  This is why any dog that goes through a behavior modification program has to have a good foundation of basic obedience First.

For example, if a dog is aggressive and it's biting people, biting neighbors, biting family, and not just play biting, but seriously biting, and it knows no obedience, no structure, no rules, and no boundaries, you can't just go in and start correcting the aggression. Because the dog gives you warning signals of when it's going to bite. These warning signals include whale eyes (where you see the whites of their eyes) stiff body, growls, air snaps, and many others. If you correct those and bypass those, the dog will stop giving warning signals and it'll go directly into biting. Then it ends up in a shelter, and then nobody can get the dog because it's aggressive, and it will probably not have a very long happy life. 

All of that could have been prevented by creating structure, obedience, discipline, rules, boundaries…everything for the puppy to succeed, so it doesn't have a chance to get unwanted behaviors. Obedience training for puppies is to prevent those things from occurring later in life. 

However, sometimes I go to somebody's house or I get a call from somebody and they have a 9, 10, or a 12 week old puppy, and the puppy has severe anxiety, fear, and maybe aggression. The first thing I say to them is, call the breeder. It's too early for behavior modification. We can do basic obedience with that puppy. Contact the breeder. It's not your responsibility. You paid $3,000 for this dog. It should not have fear, anxiety, stress, or aggression. It should be solid, grounded, stable, and be ready to learn what you want to teach it for your lifestyle. So contact the breeder first, take the dog back, get something else. Find the best dog for you. If you get it from a shelter, same thing. Take the dog back. It's not your responsibility to get a dog from a shelter for $50 because they're overflowing. 

You want a happy go lucky dog that you can mold into your lifestyle. An aggressive dog is not it. Now, some dog trainers will take on an aggressive dog, even if it's a rescue dog, but it's not a good idea because you don't know anything about the dog's past, or about the dog's history. You don't know how severe that aggression can be. You don't know anything. It's a completely different story if somebody's owned the dog for several years and it got attacked by another dog, now it's all of a sudden aggressive towards dogs. We know the history, we know the context. We know why. 

I have a client of mine with a rescue dog who is afraid of getting in the car. Before that, it was afraid of walking on a leash. So obviously it had some type of trauma with its old owners. Maybe it was tied up outside or it was dumped from a car. That's what we're guessing. So we had to first go very slowly and get the dog to start walking on a leash using high value food rewards and enticing it to just move five feet forward on the leash. It was very productive and worked very well. And then the next week, we worked on the dog getting in the car, and after about 10 minutes, the dog started jumping in the car without any food or anything. The whole behavior modification session, for getting the dog over the fear and jumping in the car, took about 20 minutes. After those 20 minutes, the session was over because the dog was wiped out. It went inside the house, it laid down, it would not move. It was emotionally drained, and this is the reason why we don't do this with young puppies. 

BeMod is very intense and requires a considerable amount of time. The outcome is unpredictable and there are no guarantees. A lot of people call and they want their dog's serious behaviors fixed right away. We don't use the word fix in behavior modification. We use control or change or minimize. Those are the better words because we have to set expectations realistically.  We have to make sure that we don't press too hard on the dog and make things worse. And we also understand and know that some serious behaviors can't be changed. They can't be modified. This is just part of reality. I oftentimes have to set expectations with people that call me who have dogs with serious behaviors, and I have to be the one to tell them that this is going to get a little bit better, but it's not gonna be perfect. It's not gonna be great, and that's not what they want to hear.

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