'But he always does it at home!'

It's a scenario that many of us have been in. Your dog is a rockstar in training at home. The cue 'sit' has his back end on the ground before you can blink. Down sees him flat on the ground, looking at you attentively. 'Stay' results in a motionless dog, concentrating entirely on you as he waits to be released.

Okay, so maybe those might be a little exaggerated - most of our dogs are, after all, works in progress - but let us say that your dog has got a good handle on basic cues in the house and garden.

You take him out for a walk and meet up with some other people in the local off lead dog friendly fields. You see something up ahead and think that you'd like to keep your dog back for a few moments while you have a chance to make sure of what's going on. Confidently, you instruct your off lead dog to sit. Your dog, meanwhile, has also seen something up ahead and is merrily frolicking off to discover what it is. You turn to your friends and say 'I don't understand, he does it every single time at home!'

This takes some practice to achieve consistently away from home!

Teaching your dog what the cue word 'sit' means at home does not teach him to sit in all situations, only at home. Outside of the places where he has been actively taught to respond to that cue, the word has little or no context to him. He may respond on some occasions and not others, depending on what is going on around him. To make the cue word something that the dog will listen and respond to wherever he hears it, you have to teach him that it applies to all situations. In training jargon, this is known as 'generalisation' or 'proofing' a behaviour. Your dog has to be taught that the word 'sit' means he has to do the same thing every single time, no matter what environment he is in or what distractions are around him.

Training advice states that you should start off teaching your dogs new things at home, in familiar surroundings. This is for a very good reason - dogs do not learn well initially in environments they find distracting, where there are new scents to follow, new dogs or people to meet, squirrels to bark at etc. Whenever you are training with your dog, you always want to set them up to succeed, so it makes sense to give them every chance to learn a new task while in a familiar setting where they can give you all of their concentration. Once the new cue has been successfully learned and associated with the behaviour that you want, it is time to get to the proofing or generalisation.

This is done by gradually introducing different environments and distractions, making sure that the dog is consistently offering the right response to the cue word and only then increasing the difficulty level further until you are confident that your dog will give you the right response no matter what is happening. This is vital training, especially when it comes to things like recall, when you may realise that your dog is unwittingly running towards a gate onto a road, or is taking off after a rabbit or towards an on-lead dog or a dog that is for any reason appearing to be unhappy at your dog's approach.

The most important thing to remember when increasing the difficulty of what you are asking your dog to do it that you must increase the value of the reward. To ask them to do something harder, you have to pay out better - humans respond to better pay for more complicated jobs and dogs are no different. Why should they ignore that really interesting scent or not go and see what's behind that hedge over there if they aren't going to get something really good for listening to you?

The dog always decides what constitute high value treats.

While it may seem frustrating contemplating having to take the time to work up through the levels of distraction, it will all seem worthwhile when your dog shows off his rockstar instant sit out in those fields with your dog-walking friends, whatever the distraction.