Too smart for their own good: negotiating with a Toller

“Sit” took about ninety seconds. I remember being impressed. I remember, specifically, thinking that the books had oversold the difficulty of this, and that we were going to be very good at training.

I was half right. She is very good at training. The books, it turned out, had not been describing the difficulty of teaching a Toller things. They had been describing what happens next.

The three-repetition problem

Here is the deal nobody explains about a genuinely intelligent dog: the learning is instant, and it never stops, and it is not restricted to your curriculum. In the time it took her to learn “sit,” she also learned where the treats are kept, which pocket they travel in, the difference between the shoes that mean a walk and the shoes that mean abandonment, and the exact sound of the good cheese being unwrapped as distinct from — this is true — every other cheese.

She learns a new behaviour in about three repetitions. The trouble is that repetition four is, from her side of the table, a completed transaction. Yes, I sit, we established this, the sitting economy has matured. Drill her like a Labrador and the performance degrades in real time — not because she has forgotten, but because you are boring her, and boredom, to a Toller, is a billing matter.

The negotiation

So every request runs through the process. You say the word. There is a pause — brief, considered, entirely deliberate — in which you are quietly appraised: what is being asked, what is on offer, whether the rate reflects current market conditions, and whether whatever she was about to do instead might not, on balance, be the stronger play. Then, usually, compliance — prompt, precise, even brilliant. But it is compliance with terms. You have not issued a command. You have closed a deal.

I want to be clear that this is not disobedience. A disobedient dog is not listening. A Toller is listening with the full attention of a mind bred to make its own decisions — and filing your consistency, your tone, and your treat pocket into a dossier she will reference for the rest of her life. The negotiation is not a failure of training. The negotiation is the training.

Convincing them it was their idea

Which brings us to the actual art. You cannot out-stubborn a Toller; they have deeper reserves and fewer appointments. What you can do is arrange the world so that the thing you want is also the most interesting thing on offer — and then let her discover it, loudly congratulate her for her genius, and pay on delivery.

Catch the calm you want and reward it, rather than demanding it. Keep sessions to minutes and quit while it is still a game, so the game keeps its value. Change what the word earns — sometimes cheese, sometimes the ball, sometimes the door opening — so the ledger never quite closes. None of this is trickery. It is diplomacy with a very sharp counterpart, and when it works, she performs the behaviour with the particular flourish of a dog executing her own excellent plan, which, by then, it is.

Who trained whom

In the interest of full disclosure, an audit of this household’s training outcomes. She has learned, at my instruction: sit, down, stay, come, spin, and a formal retrieve. I have learned, at hers: to open the back door on a single scratch, to resume throwing on the precise second the ball is returned, to surrender the good chair via a technique involving a fake alert at the window, and to interpret nine distinct sighs.

One of us learned faster. I have decided not to run the numbers on which. She sits when I ask, I open doors when she asks, and between the two of us the household runs beautifully — exactly, I have slowly come to understand, as she planned it.