The Check Cord - Look Beyond the Ribbons and Trophies

The ability to cooperate with training is, in fact, an inherited trait and one that is tragically missing from a great many breeding programs.

- Alec Sparks

I would speculate that anyone who has trained a fair number of dogs certainly has seen that some dogs are much more cooperative with targeted learning objectives than others are. I'm speaking about actually training a dog here, not just relying on genetics, be it for retrieving, flushing or pointing.

Trainability, tractability, bid-ability. The ability words.

To me it's simple: If a dog cooperates with what I'm trying to get it to do, it is generally a more enjoyable dog to train. Dogs that are less cooperative can be anywhere from challenging to incredibly difficult to train.

When we have an extremely uncooperative dog, we almost always blame our training difficulties on the dog. Many times, the problem may, in fact, be with the trainer or training program, but I do think all too often we blame the dog. Blame the dog to the point that many professionals will wash a dog out and many amateurs will either do the same or settle for a much lower bar regarding trained skill compliance.

Trainers and training aside, what may be the root cause of a very uncooperative dog?

Over the past 30 years of occasionally talking to breeders about dogs they have produced and I am training, I can think of one time - one single time - when the breeder questioned the quality of the dog they had produced rather than blaming how the owner brought the dog up or how I was actually training the dog.