Are Terriers Trainable?

Over at The Shooting Times, they ask the question, and the answer is, of course, YES.

But terriers are not phlegmatic retrievers, or laser-focused herding collies or bird dogs.

With terriers you get epic attention deficit disorder, fearless energy, and a prey drive second to none.

Terriers give a whole new perspective to dog ownership. But they are eminently trainable, as long as the human side of the arrangement can be flexible in attitude, for the desire for collaboration that we get in such breeds as gundogs and herders is totally absent in terriers unless we make doing what we want worth their while. They drive a hard bargain.

Dog types can be roughly divided into task-oriented: “What are we going to do together?” — where the task itself is the reward — and results-oriented, where the dog works towards a specific end by any available means: “What’s in it for me?”

So in order to get the co-operation of a terrier, it needs to see us not as the fun police but as a comrade-in-arms. Terriers are born anarchists, so comradeship does not come naturally and has to be earned. Though they are hardwired to do their work — and we have ours cut out to see that they don’t start before they have exchanged their milk teeth for the awesome weaponry of the adult terrier — we handlers have to install sufficient brakes so that we can be there when anything happens, rather than trailing feebly in the wake of accelerating yaps. Or worse, that deafening silence.

Right.

All this is true, but the rest of the article falls down a hole because the writer does not fully understand that for a terrier a bit of sausage will never be a strong a draw as a rat's ass.

And I mean that literally.  Most true terriers would rather kill a rat than eat.

The code explodes from within, and it is self-rewarding.  What is cheese compared to pursuit?  And is it any different for us than the dogs? Who would give up a fine day of digging for a better breakfast?  No one!  And so when we are told:

To [get a recall in the field] we use reward-based training, and don’t expect the terrier to find praise rewarding because it cares not a jot about pleasing you. It takes a great deal less effort to please itself, so we have to use cunning and forward planning to convince the terrier that it has more fun sticking with us than running off. In this we will only ever be partially successful, so we need to anticipate and deflect, being proactive rather than reactive, an attitude that can come very hard to those whose experience is of more co-operative breeds.

Right. If you want a terrier to generally check in with us to see if you have some kibble this will work. But as a way of getting a real recall in the field? Hopeless.  At best it will only be "partially successful."

This is the kind of dog training advice that is so successful that Karen Pryor, the self-styled queen of clicker training could never take her own Border Terrier off lead when it was in the woods!

Want to really know how to train a terrier to really recall? I suggest this article, which is based on experience with working terriers. Back when I was only offering cheese and praise, I too had terriers that went missing for hours on end. Now? Not so much.

This is not to say a solid recall is quick and easy with terriers. It is to say that it's not all done with kibble, cheese, squeek toys, and sausage.  With terrier training, it's long past time to enter the modern world.