Does Breed Decide How Trainable a Dog Is?

Breed matters, but it predicts what your dog wants to do far better than it predicts how well he can learn. Almost every breed can learn sit, down, place, heel, and a solid recall. What breed tells you is how hard those things will be to hold onto when something interesting happens, and what your dog will do instead if you give him nothing.

I have trained over three thousand dogs. The most common mistake I see is an owner who read that their breed is stubborn, decided training would not work, and stopped trying at month three.

What breed actually predicts

• Default behavior when bored. A Border Collie left alone will herd something. A Beagle will follow a scent. A Malinois will dismantle your furniture. This is the single most useful thing breed tells you.
• What competes with your food reward. A scent hound's nose beats chicken. A terrier's prey drive beats chicken. A Labrador's food drive means almost nothing beats chicken, which is why Labs are considered easy.
• Threshold and recovery speed. Some breeds go over threshold fast and take a long time to come back down. Others notice a deer, look, and move on.
• Sensitivity to handler pressure. A German Shepherd and a Cocker Spaniel do not absorb the same tone of voice the same way. Getting this wrong is what makes people say a dog is stubborn.

What breed does not predict

It does not predict intelligence in any way you can use. The famous rankings of smartest breeds are really rankings of biddability, meaning how much a dog wants to work with a human and how quickly it repeats a behavior on cue. That is one narrow slice of what dogs do.

A Basenji that solves a latch and gets into the pantry is not less intelligent than a Poodle that learns twelve tricks. He is less interested in your approval. Those are different traits and lumping them together is why so many owners give up on independent breeds.

It also does not predict individual temperament well enough to plan around. Within any breed, the range between individuals is wider than the average gap between breeds. I have met calm Malinois and unhinged Golden Retrievers. Train the dog in front of you, not the breed description you read.

The three groups worth thinking about

Rather than breed by breed, I find it more useful to sort dogs by what they were built to do around a human.

• Dogs bred to work with a handler. Retrievers, most herding breeds, many working line shepherds. These are the easy ones for obedience because checking in with a person is genetically rewarding. They need a job or they invent one.
• Dogs bred to work independently. Scent hounds, terriers, livestock guardians, many northern breeds. These learn fine, but they were selected to make their own decisions away from you. Recall is genuinely harder and long lines are a permanent part of life for a lot of them.
• Companion and toy breeds. Fully trainable and routinely undertrained, because their size means nobody bothers. A twelve pound dog with no manners is still a dog with no manners, and small dog owners get away with it for years and then wonder why their dog bites the groomer.

How to actually adjust for breed

The adjustments are small and specific. The core method does not change.

1. Match the reward to the drive. For a scent hound, permission to go sniff is a stronger reward than food. For a terrier, a ten second tug game beats a treat. Use the thing your dog was built to want.
2. Adjust the difficulty of the environment, not the standard. An independent breed does not need lower expectations, he needs more repetitions in more places before you trust the behavior outdoors.
3. Give the drive an outlet on a schedule. Fifteen minutes of nose work for a hound, a flirt pole session for a terrier, a structured fetch and settle routine for a retriever. Do it before you ask for calm, not after the dog has already exploded.
4. Calibrate your pressure. Soft dogs shut down under a raised voice. Harder dogs will walk through a mild correction and not register it. Watch your dog's body after any correction. If he slows and gets sticky, you were too heavy.

The honest part about the hard breeds

Some breeds are genuinely more work, and the marketing around them is dishonest. Belgian Malinois, working line Dutch Shepherds, and high drive Border Collies are wonderful dogs in the wrong home and a nightmare in the average one. Same for the guardian breeds when they hit two years old and their genetics switch on.

If you have one of those and you are overwhelmed, that is not a failure of your character. The dog needs two hours a day of structured work and you were probably told he needed a walk. Getting a professional involved early with those breeds is money well spent, and I say that as someone whose business is online courses. A high drive working dog in a small home is one of the few situations where I think in person help beats anything you can do from a screen.

What this means for your dog today

Look at your dog and answer two questions. What does he do when he is bored and unsupervised, and what is the one thing in the world that beats your treats. Then build training around those two answers.

That is more useful than any breed chart. A mixed breed rescue with an unknown history answers both questions honestly within a week of living with you, which is why I never worry much about not knowing what a rescue is made of.

The core skills are the same regardless of breed, and if you want them laid out in the order I teach them, my free ten minute foundation blueprint.

Ready to train your dog?

Every drill in this article comes from the WorldWide K9 Academy course library. If you want the full step by step system, start with the $5 intro course.