A responsible dog training company will highlight these points and emphasize their role in providing pet owners with humane, effective and individualized training plans for their clients, not in graduating a dog who is “fixed” with the implication that the training has fundamentally changed or repaired something inside the dog or that the dog’s behavior will always look the way it does on graduation day.

When it comes to behavior problems already in place, prognosis for success in any case is a matter of first defining what success means to the owner. I’ve talked before about cases where there is a mismatch between owners’ expectations and pets’ behavioral limits.

In some cases, the pet’s behavior cannot or should not be changed to the extent expected or desired by the owners, in which case owner education and support become key elements of the animal behaviorist’s job. Sometimes when you can’t be with the one you love, you’ve got to love the one you’re with!

Even when owner expectations are realistic and well-guided, however, a pet’s response to behavioral intervention is a function of the motivation for the behavior to be changed, the owners’ skill, inclination and persistence in implementing sound behavioral practices in the home, their ability to control triggering events and relevant consequences, and other factors.

With this complexity, inherent to pet behavior management and training, I find myself sadly disheartened to see training companies advertise the “guaranteed fix” approach. Our dogs and cats truly are not cars or clocks, and if they could remind us of this themselves, I’m sure they’d howl it from the rooftops!