What level of command precision is “good enough” for my dog?

Lately I’ve been thinking about when I need Scout’s commands to be really polished and precise… and when “imperfect” responses are good enough for our purposes.

I used to get really caught up in wanting my dog’s behavior to be flawless. Even when I tried to pretend I wasn’t. Our training was heavily influenced by my own ego—both in person and online—and I often felt the urge to do something a certain way just to “prove” we could.

But that external motivation was, well, arbitrary. There’s no all-seeing referee judging Scout’s behavior in every environment we visit. We’re not trying to pass some specific teacher’s test. The critiques that really matter are our own.

Considering when we ought to strive for precision in a certain behavior and when something sloppier might be good enough in practice forces me to think about the actual goal of our commands. What is the ultimate purpose I’m trying to achieve?

I wrote about this in one of the very first articles I ever published here a few years a…