Dog Training – Step 5 to the Canine Good Citizen Title

Step 5 of 10 to earning a Canine Good Citizen title for your dog is the following:

“Walking through a crowd. Goal: Dog and handler walk close to several people; dog may show casual interest but not jump up.”

This is another place where all your socialization work will pay off. You’ll be expected to move around in a group of people–from three to several–and your dog can glance at, sniff briefly at, or look at the people, but must not show undue attention to the point of stopping your forward progress, nor, jump on anyone.

You can practice this in the usual places: at the grocery store, in the park, walking down any sidewalk in town. Just make sure you keep aware of where your dog is and what he’s doing, so you can correct him quickly if necessary while you’re training.

In training, you can start out by talking to the dog to keep his attention on you, but by the time you’re ready to take the test, you cannot be talking a lot to the dog or make many corrections, so you will want to work on making sure he’s staying with you from the beginning.

A loose lead is preferred, but not so loose someone can trip over it, or the dog can wander more than an arm’s length (less is better) away from you.

Again, you’ll be expected to make some turns in the course of this test and to keep moving at your pace, not the dog’s. You’re halfway through it.

(The information in quotes at the beginning of this article is involved in the CGC test taken from the AKC test scoresheet.)

C. Rogers Upson has been training dogs and studying them for nearly 40 years. Her website is Dog Potentials and she has two dog-related stores at Keeping to the Borders and Dog Potentials-The Store.