23 Oct Your Dog Isn’t Being Stubborn. Here’s What’s Actually Going On

Your Dog Is Not Plotting Against You

Let’s just get this out of the way.

Your dog is not ignoring you to be difficult. They are not trying to win. They are not doing it on purpose to embarrass you in front of other dog owners at the park. They are not sitting there thinking “I know exactly what they want me to do and I have decided not to do it.”

Modern behavioural science does not support ideas such as dogs being spiteful, manipulative, or deliberately difficult in the human sense. Dogs are associative learners, they learn through patterns, experiences, reinforcement and emotional associations.

In other words, your dog isn’t being stubborn. They’re communicating something. And once you know what to look for, it becomes a lot less frustrating, and a lot more useful.

Why the Word “Stubborn” Is Actually Holding You Back

Here’s the problem with labelling a dog as stubborn: it tends to close the conversation.

If your dog is stubborn, the logical response is to push harder, repeat yourself more firmly, or assume that what you’re dealing with is a character flaw rather than a solvable problem. 

None of those things help. And none of them are based on how dogs actually work.

If we replace “stubborn” with “I wonder what’s actually going on here”, things start to shift. Because there is almost always a reason. And that reason is almost always something we can work with.