Common wisdom in the dog world says that terriers are lousy for obedience.  Terrier enthusiasts claim that the dogs aren’t good at obedience because they’re too smart and independent.  Detractors reason that they’re too aggressive and independent.  Delving a little further it is possible to find people who are a little more encouraging.  That school of thought maintains that terriers can be trained, but that they are too (sensitive, intelligent, independent, smart) to be trained by traditional means.  Or that they can learn all the exercises but not with the precision and enthusiasm of herding or sporting breeds.  Maybe it’s a bit off the mark and egotistical for me to question the words of people with far more terrier experience than I, but I really believe that all the rumors are preventing people from reaching anything near the potential that their terriers are capable of.

            I train animals for advertising, theater, and film, and it was on the set of a movie a year and a half ago that I started thinking about how strange the untrainable terrier mystique was.  Several of us were sitting around ‘chewing the fat’ and the conversation turned to my newly acquired Norfolk Terrier puppy.  The other trainers, who are not involved with AKC dog sports and know nothing about them, all teased me that the only reason I’d gotten a terrier was that I was getting lazy in my old age and had finally caved in and gotten a breed that was easy to train.  The joke here, for AKC dog sport people, is that these trainers were entirely serious in their belief that terriers are easy to train.  Every last one of them had a Jack Russell among their pack, and among them they also had a Wire Fox, a Scottie, and a Westie.  Theatrical animal trainers LOVE working with terriers.  Terriers, they will tell you, have enough energy to work for extended periods of time.  They’re quick learners, enthusiastic agile workers, and have a sharp focus.  They are tough and motivated.  It’s hard to see what’s not to like about them as obedience dogs.

            When I started obedience training as a teenager it was at an obedience school which was owned by a woman who trained Scotties.  Her first one, found as an adult rescue with more than her share of ‘excess baggage’ easily earned her CDX and came very close to her UD.  Her second one had a better start in life and earned her UD with no trouble.  I ended up teaching at that school for 25 years, in no small part because the owner was one of the few people I had met who was truly open minded about a dog’s ability to learn.  For several years I was the only instructor who did not own a terrier.

            Having gotten a terrier of my own, I finally was able to see for myself what all this terrier mystique was about.  The biggest difficulty I’ve come across is that my Norfolk is far more reactive than my non-terrier breeds have been.  He’s always alert, barks whenever someone is at the door, and on his own time is apt to act first and think later in a way that my other dogs did not.  He is extremely emotional and would fall apart if someone yelled at him.  I’ve seen him fall apart when another dog was getting yelled at.  I can’t see this as a negative, however, because I can’t fathom why anyone would yell at a dog in the name of training.  He works for food, toys, praise, and a chance to work some more.  He is no more or less responsive to a well timed and fairly executed collar correction than any other dog I’ve owned.  We have not competed in obedience yet because he’s competing in breed, earthdog, junior showmanship and agility, and works in advertising in his ‘free’ time.  Maybe when he finally gets into the obedience ring I’ll find out I was wrong, but I don’t think so.  At this point he’s not quite two years old and is almost trained through utility.  There are a lot of rough edges we’ll polish before we get into the ring, but the basic concepts are all there.  Like a lot of quick learners he is not impassioned with the novice exercises, but the challenges of everything from drop on recalls to scent discrimination really drove him to succeed.  In short, he’s pretty much like any other intelligent dog trained with a modicum of common sense.  His temperament is terrier through and through, and that works to his advantage.  It’s time we stop letting ‘common knowledge’ get in the way of our success with our dogs.  Terriers are the perfect group for obedience, don’t shortchange them.