As a dog trainer, I spend a lot of time teaching dogs commands, but there are also situations where I want my dogs to just know what they are supposed to do without a command. For example, I want them to automatically wait to come out of the car, their crates or the front door of the house. I want my puppies to learn to automatically sit to greet people and to sit to have their leashes put on. For agility, I want an automatic down on the pause table.

Why don’t I use a command? Mostly because I don’t want the behavior to be dependant on my presence. I still want my dogs to greet people politely even if I’m out of the room. I want them to wait to exit the car even if someone else opens the door or the door pops open because I failed to latch it properly. 

In these examples, the environment itself becomes the cue for the behavior: an open gate is a cue to wait, the leash is a cue to sit etc. This is actually easier than teaching verbal commands since dogs don’t naturally pay much attention to language but they are very aware of changes in the environment. By far the hardest part is remembering not to say anything! 

So it’s worth considering in a variety of situations whether you want to use a command or have the situation itself be the command. If you are going to teach a default behavior, it’s just as important to be consistent as it is with a verbal command. That means every time you take the dog out the door, you enforce an automatic wait—if your dog starts to go through the door without permission, you use a leash, the door, or body blocking to stop them. You will also need to reward the automatic wait some of the time. If you are going to release your dog from the default behavior (allow him out the door or off the pause table, for example), be sure to use the same release cue that you do from a stay (Free! or OK!).

And it works!

I recently had reason to be glad that I teach boundaries at my house as default behaviors. My dad was visiting and had been out in the garden in the morning and must not have closed the back gate off my deck properly. We left to go to Home Depot and came back an hour later to find the gate wide open. From inside the house, I couldn’t see Lexi (who had access to the deck through a dog door), but when I ran outside I found her lying inside the open gate watching wildlife. What a relief! What a good dog!