If we work hard to look for a silver lining that has come out of the Michael Vick dog fighting scandal and related crimes, it can easily be identified as all of the dogs that were saved.  Conventional wisdom before Michael Vick’s dogs were saved, held that Pitt Bulls could not be re-trained to be good and ‘safe’ pets after they had been trained to fight.  In most cases where dogs were seized from property where they had been trained to fight, they were typically killed.

The dogs that were rescued from Michael Vick have in many cases been retrained and conditioned and are now living happily with real families. 

Now, your average family that has a dog will not necessarily be likely to experience these extreme conditions with a pit.  However, many families with pets also tend to hold to the conventional wisdom that their current pet at whatever age they may be might just be set in their ways.  Just because a dog is 4 or 8 or 10 even, it doesn’t mean that they too can’t be trained.

It is often the pet owner that is preventing the training because they hold to that incorrect conventional wisdom that old dogs can’t learn new tricks, when in fact the old dog may never get a chance to learn because the owners are not giving them a chance. 

In reality dogs of all ages can be trained and retrained.  Regardless of whether a pup is sent for initial puppy training, or an older dog attends dog obedience school, it is possible to train and re-train that pooch!

Now, I do not write this standing on a sanctimonious pedestal.  I own three dogs.  One of those dogs has developed and re-enforced a very bad barking habit.  For quite some time she barked incessantly for no reason.  We moved a couple years back and our new home is located near water.  We get a lot of wild geese and ducks coming into our yard and they tend to make a mess everywhere, getting onto our porch, decks, sidewalks, cars, and roofs.

We taught our dog to bark and keep the geese and ducks herded out of and away from these areas.  The fowl have now been trained and they don’t set foot in our yard mostly. 

Unfortunately for our barking dog, her mission in life is now without a purpose. So she has repurposed her training and now barks to little effect at the birds in the distance.  The birds do not move and she does not stop barking. 

Things are getting to the point where we need to consider some more in depth training that surpasses our own abilities, because we essentially need to reverse some general training that we instigated and also curb something that was previously a bad habit.

I came across a group that offers dog training Toronto.  They also have franchises all around North America for that matter.  They specialize in training dogs in their homes or yards.  For our dog, it would do little good to train her not to bark in obedience school because the stimulus for her barking exists in our yard and not in a ‘school’ environment.  That’s when you really need an expert to come and visit and help with the conditioning.

For many people, they might attend the quick weekend sessions at the local strip mall with a pet store located there.  Those training sessions are usually more about training the pet owners and less about training the actual canine.   For what we need, we need the dog to be trained and we might need some re-conditioning ourselves.  Fortunately for us, and for people around the country, thanks to the tragedies surrounding Michael Vick’s dogs, the dogs that survived have helped to show people that old dogs can learn new tricks, even in the most extreme circumstances.