Training a Tibetan Terrier to Respect Personal Space

By: David Codr

Published Date: November 9, 2017

Isaac Tibetan Terrier - Training a Tibetan Terrier to Respect Personal Space

In this Omaha dog training session we worked with 1 year-old Tibetan Terrier Isaac who doesn’t always listen to his guardians or respect personal space.

Isaac was a pretty excited dog when I arrived for this in home dog training session. I was chuckling a bit watching him pogo jump over and over due to being such an excited dog.

When we discussed the dog behavior problems, I found out that a lack of structure had likely confused Isaac into thinking he had the same authority as his humans. Problem is, when a dog sees you as a peer, then listening to you become optional.

This lack of structure likely contributed greatly to Isaac’s anxious behavior. He took quite a while to settle down and even when he did, it was short lived. Anytime he heard a sound he got up, growled, barked or paced around the room. Im betting Isaac felt like he has been on duty for quite a long time. This likely stressed him out and got even worse when the humans didn’t listen to his corrections.

After sharing a number of positive dog training tips, one of the kids asked if they could have a snack. This gave us a perfect opportunity to put what we had discussed earlier into action.

I asked the child to come and sit at the table in the living room so I could coach the mother to teach the dog to respect space through the process of enforcing an invisible boundary.

The mother will get better responses from Isaac as she gets more practiced at using the escalating consequences to train the dog to keep a respectable distance from her daughter as she snacked. Training a dog to respect children’s space will take a little time, but pay big dividends once the skill is acquired.

As a dog behaviorist, I have found that recreating situations like this will allow the family members to teach the dog how they want it to behave in all kinds of situations. Breaking things into small steps and practicing them over and over before moving onto the next step will help Isaac adopt more desired dog behaviors.

Next we stepped out for a quick walk so I could show the guardian how to use a Martingale collar with the special twist of the leash. We started off by going over tips to stop the dog from getting excited during the leashing process.

Next we covered my five rules for a structured walk. You can watch that dog training video with this link.

The guardian was a little slow and not intense enough in her corrections as we practiced. But as she gets more experience and comfortable with them, her technique and results should improve.

By the end of the session, Isaac was following some of the new rules on his own, stopped invading personal space and was following commands and corrections.

We wrapped things up with a roadmap to success video summarizing most of the dog behavior secrets I shared with the family during our session.

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This post was written by: David Codr