“It will fix jumping.”
Begging. Chewing. Pottying in the house. All sorts of bad habits.
That’s what we used to tell dog owners that we worked with. Thankfully… we don’t do that anymore.
Because it’s largely not true.
The “Place” command is a popular command, essentially telling a dog to go sit or lie down on a dog bed or cot until they are told that they can get up.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with it… except the fact that for *most owners* it’s a massive waste of time.
Because teaching the place command does not teach your dog to greet your guests politely.
It does not teach them to stop begging, or to ask you to go potty outside. It doesn’t fix aggression, and it doesn’t teach them to stop stealing household items.
It does teach a dog to go to a spot and stay in a spot (if they are trained well enough to get that good at it!).
What we found though, is that largely, the command is often used to keep a dog in one place, and doesn’t directly teach them how to actually make good choices at liberty (meaning, they’ll still do the bad behavior when they are off of the “place”). We’ve seen it happen over and over again. A dog, waiting eagerly on their bed to be released from it… only to run up and jump all over a guest immediately once they are free. Often, it turns into a frustrating game of chasing the dog down to put them back on the bed after they’ve shown that they don’t actually know how to behave at all unless they are stuck there.
Part of our job is making dog training as easy as possible for dog owners to be successful with… and it turns out… it takes less time to teach a dog to greet guests politely while loose, than it does to teach them “Place” well enough to ignore the temptation of saying hello to their favorite visitor.
Instead of teaching a dog to ignore temptation and stay on a bed… and also teach a dog how to behave when off the bed… we figured… won’t it take less time to just ditch one of those things entirely and teach the dog to behave so that they don’t even need the bed? So that dog owners don’t have to worry about putting their dog back on the bed a thousand times and still have their dog getting into trouble anytime they are free from the bed?
So that’s exactly what we did. We (mostly) ditched the “Place” command. We still teach it to about 10% of the dog owners we work with, but most of the time, we don’t find that it actually helps the dog owners we work with reach their goals faster.
Here are some things that we don’t use the “Place” command for anymore:
Teaching a dog to stop jumping or being mouthy with guests
Potty training
Chewing household items
Countersurfing or begging
Door darting or escaping the house
Here are some things we might use the “Place” command for:
Teaching patience to a dog who struggles to relax
A tool to help manage household aggression between two dogs
A “safe zone” for dogs who might be shy or anxious about guests being in their space
Building confidence in a dog who needs help feeling comfortable stepping up onto raised surfaces.
While we don’t believe there is anything “wrong” with using or teaching this command… we also don’t believe it’s a real solution so some of the challenges that dog owners face every day.
So… if you decide that you don’t care and don’t want to go teach your dog to lay on a bed… the good news is that absolutely nothing bad will happen as a result of that choice. You can see great results in changing your dog’s behavior without it.