Are senior dogs trainable?

We often receive questions from dog parents who are afraid they’ve missed their chance to train their dogs: “he grew too old, is it too late to train him?”. But we are here to give you a very certain answer: ❗️“NO” ❗️

Dogs keep learning their whole lives, and you can train a canine of any age. Moreover, regular training sessions will help prevent dementia when your pet gets older.

It is always hard to see how humans give up on their older dogs, who then have nothing to do and live in a constant state of boredom.🙈

Dogs that were trained as puppies are easier to train in adulthood✔️. However, if you start training your adult dog for the first time ever – you’ll have to be patient. Older dogs have already formed habits, sometimes bad ones, and correcting is always harder than training from scratch. But it is possible! And positive reinforcement that is used correctly does wonders!

Senior dogs suffer from illnesses at times, so they might have difficulties getting into certain positions (sit-stand-down sequences, for example). They might already have some dementia, so they tend to forget things and get a bit annoyed.

That’s why you should always:

🔹 be patient;
🔹make training sessions very short (just like with puppies);
🔹 divide the task into many-many tiny steps (even if you think that everything is beyond understandable).

Training senior dogs is all about games and short sessions. This is more than enough in the majority of cases. Trust us: everything is not as complicated and scary as it may seem.👍

Our #everydoggy app will help you train your adult dog too! We have a great course for adult canines 💛

Scroll to Top