Teaching an old dog new tricks

It's not as hard as they make out.

Dogs work from a 'reinforcement history' (the more a certain behaviour is reinforced, the more likely it is to happen again) which is why older dogs can have some bad habits - anything they have done which is 'self reinforcing' (jumping on the furniture makes them comfortable) or that they have been inadvertently rewarded for (begging at the dinner table, for example).

Dogs that have a strong reinforcement history in begging at the table, will be harder to train out of it, hence the saying 'you can't take an old dog new tricks' but it's certainly not impossible.

More to the point, the saying itself appears to be very inaccurate - whilst it means that you can't stop bad habits in old dogs (and, often made reference to when discussing elderly people), it actually sounds like you can't teach anything new to an old dog which is completely untrue!

An elderly dog obviously doesn't learn as quickly as a young pup would, but in my experience teaching an elderly dog new behaviours is very similar to teaching any dog above the age of 2 years a new behaviour.

So don't let your dog's age put you off training him! Using the right methods, your elderly dog will pick up on things just as easily as any other adult dog!