Everybody has heard the old adage, “an old dog can’t learn new tricks”, and there is certainly some accuracy to this saying. The best time to start training a pet dog is when they’re still puppies, or adolescents, but once they’ve reached adulthood, behaviour has started to become engrained in who they are, which means that over-riding their learned behaviour is a lot more difficult.

Even though all of this is true, there are plenty of techniques that you can use which will have more impact than you might expect. If they already are quite obedient dogs in most cases, you may actually find it easier to train an adult dog than a puppy, as they are going to have a better understanding of instructions. Of course, it is also unfair to paint all adult dogs with the same brush, as a dog which is 3 years old is going to have an easier time of learning how to stop a bad habit than a dog which is 10 years old.