Cutter wrote on Apr 7, 2010, 19:59:
That means there's either a problem with the dog or you, and it's generally the latter as has been my experience.

-EDIT-
I should comment, my family has never used electric fences, shock collars, or muzzles. We use the leash as needed but that's about it. Then again we rarely take him far from the neighborhood.

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Others will disagree, but I believe there are varying levels of "trained," and thus more than 1 acceptable training "state." The dog you describe definitely sounds very well trained, I see these in the cities sometimes (saw them a lot in Europe).

We live in a Suburb, our dogs over the years have always been allowed to roam the un-fenced yard free of leash (or supervision) without any incident. Though for the first few months we try to make sure they learn the property borders first: starting with only walking them with leash, then tying them to a central tree with a long rope, then only supervised, then free to do what they want.

My dad will also sometimes take him off-leash to across the street to see our neighbors and their dog (if they have one).

However when we took them on walks or car rides we always leash them, though they might walk with us just fine for most of the part they've also tended to be overly friendly and want to meet people nearby (which some people don't like).

Plus, I wouldn't trust them to not run across the street to meet another dog and either get hit by a car or into a fight (if it came to it).

So, to some our dogs might seem poorly trained and I'll concede that they could be trained better than they are. Heck, taking my dog to a city filled with people would probably freak him out, and it would probably take him a while to adjust and just ignore being around so many strangers.

However our dogs are trained well enough for our standards.

This comment was edited on Apr 8, 2010, 18:35.