An Exercise to Help a Colorado Mountain Dog Learn to Listen to and Respect the Kids

For this Omaha dog training session we worked with Chara, a 1 year-old Colorado Mountain Dog who doesn’t always listen to or respect the family’s kids at times.

Chara had taken our puppy socialization classes so we spent the first part of the session doing a refresher. The guardians were doing a good job of most of what was covered in class, but one person was the leader and the other family members were sometimes inconsistent.

Id like to see the family emphasize Petting with a Purpose and passive training which are easy ways to train a dog to see and respect its humans as leaders. This article I wrote on motivating kids to help train the family dog may come in handy here.

Because the dog was dominating or not listening to the youngest members of the family, I decided to show them how to practice the leadership exercise I developed almost a decade ago. This is a great exercise to help a human practice communicating and projecting leadership to a dog and helps the dog practice listening to and not challenging the human.

The goal if this exercise is to teach the dog that challenging humans never works, while giving the dog the opportunity to practice some some self control. I love multitasking. You can watch me demonstrate and learn how to practice the leadership exercise by watching the video below.

This exercise is an easy way to teach a dog to listen to and respect a child. You can learn how to use this version of the leave it exercise to help a dog act more obedient towards kids and members of the family.

After I had everyone practice the leadership exercise until they were getting the same results that I was getting. This is an easy way to get a dog to listen and respect you that anyone can do, even if you aren’t a professional Colorado Mountain dog trainer.

After the leadership exercise we worked on a little basic training; brushing up on the dog’s recall since they do not have a fence and the dog likes to run away. I recommended the guardians do some recall practice every day to build up a strong recall and help the dog practice listening to his humans. This video from another session has some tips may help too.

To help the guardians remember everything we covered in this in home Omaha dog training session, we recorded a roadmap to success summary video that you can check out below.