Mistake #3: Conflicting Goals
In the last post I talked about what happens when we restrict a reactive dog’s choices before it has any good ones to opt for. There’s a related mistake, but it doesn’t come from restricting the dog’s choices. It comes from asking the dog and the owner to work on two separate goals at the same time, like holding a heel position while also learning how to respond to triggers in the environment. On paper, these seem like they should coexist. In practice, they collide more often than most trainers expect.
Two New Skill Sets, One Novice Handler
Before I get into the behavioral side of this, I want to start with the more practical problem, because I think it’s the simpler one to see and it sets up everything else.
Most of the owners we work with are new to this. They’ve usually just learned to hold a heel position, which is its own set of skills: where to keep their hands, when to reward, how to read their dog’s position relative to their own body, how to correct a drift without overcorrecting. That’s a lot on its own for somebody who has never trained a dog before.
Now we’re also asking them to simultaneously execute a separate skill set for handling triggers. Reading their dog’s body language, recognizing when a response is healthy versus when it’s escalating, knowing when to intervene and when to let the dog work it out. That’s an entirely different kind of attention, and a different set of decisions.
Asking a novice handler to do both of these at the same time, in the same rep, is a lot like asking someone to pat their head and rub their belly simultaneously. Both are learnable. Doing them at once, before either one is close to automatic, is where people fall apart. And when our clients fall apart in the moment, we lose consistency, we lose confidence, and we lose follow through at home.
When the Rules Collide
This is where it gets more serious than just an overloaded owner.
Say a client has been taught that their dog should hold a heel position at their left side. Now we’re out on a walk and working around triggers, and here comes another dog walking toward us, also passing on our left. Our dog does something we’ve been hoping for, it doesn’t react. No stiffening, no fixating, no reaction whatsoever, which for a reactive dog is a genuine win. But in the process, its attention wavers and it drifts out of position.
And now the trainer is stuck. Do we reward this? Reward it and we’re reinforcing a break in heel, undermining the very criteria we’ve spent weeks building. Don’t reward it, or worse, correct it for the position break, and we’re punishing or ignoring the exact moment we should be celebrating.
Either way, the trainer is losing the forest for the trees. Most of these clients didn’t hire us because they want a dog with a flawless heel. They hired us, and paid us, because they want the lunging and barking to stop. The dog just handed us that, and we couldn’t respond appropriately due to overlapping goals.
The problem becomes more significant when the dog breaks the obedience position to offer a genuinely prosocial response to the trigger. This could be the dog crossing from the handler’s left side to the right side to create a bit more space. It could be as simple as the dog dropping its head to sniff, which can often be what’s referred to as a cutoff signal, a way of saying “I see that, and I’m choosing not to engage with it.” Both of these are instinctive, healthy, low-arousal ways of managing a moment that could otherwise escalate. However, I regularly watch trainers correct the dog for these choices or simply fail to reward them because they break the heel criteria, without ever recognizing what the dog was actually communicating.
In each of these cases, the dog isn’t failing. It’s doing the harder, more mature thing, entirely on its own. And we’re not in a position to reinforce it, because we were working on two distinct goals at the same time, and in this moment those goals were conflicting with one another.
The Dog Gets Stuck Too
It’s worth pointing out that the confusion here doesn’t just belong to the handler. The dog gets caught in it as well.
Even a dog that has genuinely started to figure out that creating space works doesn’t necessarily know whether that choice is allowed in this moment, especially if it has been corrected for breaking heel before. It may want to move away. It may even start to. But that hesitation, the half second of not knowing whether it’s safe to act, is often where things go sideways and a dog falls back on the behavior we’re trying to eliminate in the first place: barking and lunging, because that has always been their default response.
We talk a lot about the confidence and clarity our human clients need. Our dogs need the same thing, and conflicting criteria takes it away from both ends of the leash at once.
While heel is the clearest and most common version of this, the same problem can show up any time we stack multiple goals into a single exercise. Heel just happens to be the one that comes up most commonly.
The Fix: Separate the Sessions, Not Just the Moments
The way out of this isn’t complicated, but it does require being intentional about it. When you’re working a session on trigger response, don’t ask for heel at all. Not a relaxed version of it, not an occasional reminder of it. Leave it out of that session entirely.
This is a step further than simply suspending the criteria near a trigger. If heel is still technically in play anywhere in that session, a dog that has been corrected for breaking it just moments ago may still hesitate, still wonder if this is one of those moments it’s expected to hold position. Taking heel off the table for the entire session removes that question before it can even come up. The dog isn’t guessing. The owner isn’t juggling two rule sets and trying to decide which one applies in a given moment.
This does three things at once. It gives the dog one clear rule to operate under for the whole session, not a rule that might or might not apply depending on the moment. It gives the owner one thing to focus on and read, instead of dividing their attention between heel mechanics and trigger response. And it makes our job as trainers considerably easier too, because we’re only evaluating one thing: what choice is the dog making when it sees the trigger. We’re not simultaneously critiquing the owner’s leash handling and coaching a behavioral response at the same time.
Sequence these skills instead of stacking them. Build heel in its own sessions. Build trigger response in its own sessions. Let each one stand fully on its own before you ever ask a dog, or a novice handler, to run them together.
Next post, we’ll get into mistake #4.
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