It’s not news to anyone in the rescue, trainer, or breeder communities: we’re struggling with a pervasive owner education problem. Despite nearly always having the best of intentions, too many owners have too many gaps in basic knowledge on how to handle, train, raise, care for, and communicate with their dogs. Those knowledge gaps – which many owners aren’t even aware they have – not only make their and their dog’s lives and relationships more stressful and less fulfilling, they also produce often serious, negative, and avoidable outcomes.

Anecdotally, trainers see it every single day: a dog tearing up the house because they’re not getting enough physical or mental stimulation; or developing reactivity because they’re thrust into the dog park stressed and terrified without their owner spotting any of that body language; or relentlessly barking because they’re left alone without any separation anxiety conditioning; or completely blowing off their handler’s cues because of inconsistent ‘training;’ or jumping on visitors because it’s unintentionally reinforced with attention; or biting kids because they’ve never been exposed to children, never received bite inhibition training, and the children are allowed to engage with them in the unpredictable, erratic, forward way that kids too; on and on, every day in every house and community, we see owners unwittingly engaging in behavior that leads to bad outcomes ranging from stressful nuisances and anxious, under-enriched dogs to serious safety risks to people and dogs. At the same time, owners are missing out on the opportunity for the far more profound, intimate relationship with their dog that comes from mutual comprehension.

So where is this problem coming from? Why isn’t the average owner more knowledgeable, when it benefits them more than anyone? It’s certainly not for any lack of resources: there are tons of fantastic educational resources out there – books, classes, videos, online courses, private trainers, etc. – every sort of media, at every level of experience, time commitment, and expense.

I suggest that we are, at least in part, facing a ‘pipeline problem’:

• First off, many owners don’t know what they don’t know. They don’t realize how significant their gaps in knowledge are – or appreciate its consequences (farther below, we’ll talk about why I think this may be happening).
• As a result, despite the abundance of fantastic resources out there, many owners never truly start their learning journey.

In 2013, Stepita et al.[1] found that as few as 5% of puppy owners in the US may take a class. That finding is seemingly verified by the annual APPA National Pet Owners Surveys in 2022 (5%) and 2023 (6%). Even if those are grossly underestimating, it seems we could confidently say that over half of dog owners – equivalent to 40+ million dogs – never take a class.

In other words, we’ve built a fantastic educational pipeline – from puppy books and basic obedience classes to private training, the CGC, and dog sports – but we aren’t getting enough owners into that pipeline. Not enough owners are starting their educational journey.

We can see all of this play out in the data. First off, in this first figure we can see that yes, indeed, dog ownership is exploding:

Note that trend is pre-pandemic, even before the ‘covid puppy’ boom. Since 2001, the number of dogs in the US has increased by nearly 40%, more than twice as fast as population growth. Per The Economist, now more households in the United States have dogs than have children.

On top of that, owners also care more than ever about their dogs:

Again, the data reflects what we see anecdotally: as people increasingly delay or forego childbearing, not only are more of them getting dogs, they are also committing more emotional and financial energy to them. Our relationship with dogs is changing – we increasingly see them as profound personal relationships, as members of our family.

Now, however, let’s look farther down the pipeline, at the number of new people entering dog sports:

Think about that: in the same period that dog ownership has risen by nearly 40%, new entrants in competition obedience have fallen by over half![2] In 2002 around 5,000 dogs earned AKC Novice Obedience titles; by 2022 that number fell to around 2,400 – that’s a staggering decline, especially given that the actual number of dogs in the US increased substantially in that period.

Of course, dog sports aren’t really the point of what we’re talking about; you can be a responsible, competent handler without doing sports. Rather, if we think back to that pipeline, sports are downstream. Dog sports competitors start as folks in their first Basic Obedience class, who then go on to the CGC, and then try out Agility or Rally etc., and finally get hooked from there. Seeing a decline this substantial in novice sports participation is just another data point supporting the broader observation that we may not be getting enough owners into the educational system upstream.

Therein lies the pipeline problem: more of us own dogs, and spend more time, energy, and money our dogs, than ever before – and yet fewer and fewer of us seem to be going down the ‘pipeline’ of books and classes that then lead some portion of us into dog sports.

So why is this all happening? Why don’t dog owners realize their gaps in knowledge, and seek the resources that would alleviate it?

I would argue that at root we have a cultural issue. Most owners think “If I want a dog, I go to the shelter, get a dog, take it home, and take care of it.” Nowhere in that sequence is the idea that you need to actually learn how to handle, care for, train, or communicate with a dog. Culturally, in how dogs are portrayed in media, in how we talk about them and perceive them, the average person just doesn’t think of dog handling as a skill that needs to be learned. It’s silly really: if you want to sail, you obviously need to learn how to sail; if you want to take up woodworking, cure meats, or go skiing you obviously need to learn how; and yet if you want to handle a dog, we somehow think no learning is required. And so despite the best of intentions, despite a major emotional and financial commitment, owners are often grossly unprepared, without even realizing it.

In other words, we have, in part at least, an awareness problem; most owners don’t realize:

• That dog handling is a skill
• That they have serious (but easily remedied) gaps in knowledge
• Or that those gaps in knowledge can have serious consequences for them and their dog

At a macro level, this education problem is at least contributing to poor outcomes for dogs on a truly massive scale: in the US today, roughly 1 in 3 dogs is given up for adoption, 1 in 10 adopted dogs is returned to the shelter, and 1 in 18 dogs is euthanized.[3]

How do we fix that? How do we get more owners into the fantastic educational pipeline we as a community have built? That question was the inspiration behind our creation of the RCO Primer and RCOC. To permit myself at least a brief shameless plug, we created a few resources:

(1) The RCO Primer:

• An educational resource and reference for new owners, to give them a place to start.

(2) The RCO Certification:

• A relatively easy-to-pass exam, designed as a series of real-world scenarios asking what an owner should do in different situations, testing only the very basics of what any owner really needs to know.
• The idea is that rescues, breeders, and trainers can require (or incentivize) their clients to pass the RCOC. The RCOC then gives owners at least a first minimum exposure to basic concepts.
• The exam is not meant to be difficult – each question is linked to the RCO Primer chapter needed to answer it, and the questions themselves are designed to teach, not trick.
• Instead, the goal is to help more owners realize what they don’t know – about socialization, crate training, separation anxiety, teaching cues, etc. – and thereby encourage more owners to start their educational journey, going on to read books, take classes, and work with trainers.

(3) Our Further Resources page:

• Throughout the RCOC and RCO Primer we repeatedly illustrate to owners the need to and value of reading books, taking classes, and working with a trainer.
• To help them get started there, in addition to the Primer, we have collected a list of reliable resources on a variety of topics.

Our hope is that if even 1 in 10 owners that takes the RCOC goes on to become a better handler as a result – taking classes, working with a trainer, getting their CGC and TK titles, and, for some, going on to pursue dog sports – that would be a massive impact on the lives of millions of dogs.

[1] Stepita, ME; Bain, MJ; Kass, PH; Journal of the American Animal Hospitalization Association 2013

[2] That figure might surprise some: total ‘participation’ in dog sports, as in the total number of trial-entrances per year (so 1 dog that goes to 10 trials would be 10 trial-entrances), has risen in this period, even as the number of Novice titles has fallen. That seems to be a reflection of an increase in the number of titles: there appear to be fewer unique dogs trialing, but each dog is going to far more trials.

Another question in a reader’s mind might be: “is this a real decline, or are new owners just being cannibalized from rally, obedience, and agility to other, growing sports like scent work and protection sports?” While that intuition is sound, the broader data suggests that migration to other sports is insufficient to explain the bulk of this decline, for several reasons: (a) this trend predates the bulk of those sports (NACSW scent work, for example, was only introduced in 2009, and only gained appreciable traction in the early 2010s); (b) the total population in those sports is smaller than this decline, and doubly so when overlap is considered; and (c) the trends above are secular, linear, and consistent over the full 20-year period, if it were a cannibalization effect you would expect more nonlinear steps as new competing sports are introduced.

Ideally, a more granular examination of the data, looking at individual-dog data (rather than titles, since one dog can compete in multiple sports), across more sports would address those questions more thoroughly. For the time being, however, the available data seems to suggest a clear and longitudinal net decline in the number of new owners entering dog sports.

[3] Based on ASPCA 2019 adoption estimates versus total annual dog population; at least 47% of these are specifically for behavioral issues; and Hoffman, CL; Thibault, M; Hong J; Frontiers in Veterinary Science 8, 2021