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 that 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 ago called "Why Does Your Dog Need to Do... Well, Anything?". It's a broad line of thought I revisit regularly — this time around I'm focusing on specific command criteria.
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