My name is Brittany, and I’m a professional dog trainer for our Great Dog Day School program. I’ve had the privilege of training hundreds of dogs through What a Great Dog. Before my time here, I was a zookeeper. I cared for loads of different species and individuals, but if you’ve ever asked me, “What was your favorite?” I’ve certainly told you it was the lions.

Therefore, I find myself rather qualified to write this article.

I’ve said it for a while, but I finally wanted to get it out to the masses: I think lions were easier to train than (some) dogs.

#1 Lions are big, hungry, and highly motivated.

Lions are what we call obligate carnivores, meaning they have to eat meat. Meat is DENSE in nutrients, and there’s a reason it’s your pup’s favorite snack. Because lions are trained using their daily portion (and sometimes a few extras) of meat, they’re SUPER motivated to work.

Some dogs are kind of “whatever” about food (I’m looking at you, sighthounds), which can make reward-based training a little more challenging. I still haven’t figured out a way to bottle and parcel out watching and chasing squirrels.

In order to motivate your pup, there are a lot of factors to consider. Sometimes it’s a better paycheck (and maybe that paycheck isn’t food!). Sometimes it’s altering the environment to make your paycheck seem more valuable. Sometimes it’s convincing your learner that they even want to work with you in the first place (husky, basenji, chows).

Dogs are beautiful, nuanced beings, not only across breeds but as individuals. I think that’s why trainers geek out about breeds so much. There’s a lot baked into who that dog is, what motivates them, and how they move through the world. It helps us identify how best to motivate and work with them.

#2 Lions don’t need their nails trimmed, teeth brushed, or manes combed.

While lions do need their own forms of cooperative care, and as mentioned in the previous point, they’re generally pretty easy to motivate. Lions are also tough. A prick in the side for a vaccination injection? Bee sting. But for the most part, lions get to just go be lions.

I’ve never had to bathe a lion. But I have bathed a Malamute, and let me tell you, it can be rough.

Dogs need regular grooming and handling. They have to learn to tolerate (or better yet, participate in) routine husbandry and grooming. Have you ever trimmed a pug’s nails? I don’t recommend it. I’d rather put fly spray on a lion’s ears, or better yet, do an intranasal COVID test…

Because these activities are such a regular part of your dog’s life, it’s important to give these skills just as much thought and effort as all of our normal “obedience” skills. It’s great that my shepherd can sit, but what I REALLY like is being able to do her nails without a fuss.

#3 Lions don’t steal your socks and run away with them.

You know what lions don’t do? Counter surf, get into the trash can, steal the laundry, or destroy the furniture. That’s because lions are heavily managed. They’re not given those opportunities. They’re in lion habitats doing lion things.

Dogs, on the other hand, live in our homes, in our habitat, and sometimes they’re just doing dog things that are inappropriate in our human homes. Stealing your sock and running away with it, instigating a nice game of chase, is SUPER fun for your dog! They have no concept of what that sock cost, the money you spent buying it, or the care that went into laundering it. They just know that stealing it is fun, and sometimes chasing you around the house makes it even more fun.

A lot of the “naughty” behaviors our dogs get up to are self-reinforcing. In other words, the behavior itself is rewarding! This makes them incredibly difficult to change without some boundaries, management, and a little creativity.

Sometimes a big part of the training plan is simply preventing your dog from practicing the behavior in the first place.

#4 Lions don’t live with you 24/7, learning from every interaction.

When I wanted to train a lion, I would ball up some meat, put it in a bucket, grab my gloves, a target stick, whatever other equipment was needed, grab my training partner, and we’d be off to the races. Then, when we were done, we’d walk away.

Most of our dogs live in our homes with us, and they’re ALWAYS watching. Especially puppies (as if they don’t already need all of your time and attention just for house training alone). With our dogs, formal training sessions are but a tiny fraction of the time they’re learning. Some pups are easier than others, but some dogs were specifically bred to live alongside people and read us like a book! I dare say dogs are better at reading human body language than most humans.

Our dogs are always “in school.” They’re learning from how we respond to barking, jumping, pulling, and just about everything else they do throughout the day.

We need to think often about “rewarding what you like.” If we want our dogs to repeat the behaviors we enjoy, we have to make sure those behaviors are paying off!

#5 Lions aren’t expected to navigate human social expectations.

Never once in my years of being a zookeeper did anyone ask me if they could pet the lion. People generally understand that lions need their personal space. On the occasions when I got to take guests behind the scenes, no one was surprised that the lions didn’t immediately love them. Surprise! They don’t know you.

And introductions to other lions? Incredibly thought out. They took weeks of planning and many more weeks of careful integration and implementation. Nobody just tossed two lions together and hoped they’d become best friends.

But with dogs, we have some pretty interesting expectations.

We expect our dogs to tolerate strangers, children, unfamiliar dogs, crowded spaces, grooming, and handling. We expect them to know the difference between a friendly stranger and a potential threat, an appropriate playmate and a dog they’d rather avoid, and a squirrel that’s worth chasing versus one they should politely ignore.

And let’s talk about that squirrel.

We’ve spent generations selectively breeding dogs to notice things, chase things, herd things, guard things, retrieve things, and react to things. Then we take them for a walk and get frustrated when they notice a squirrel from a quarter mile away.

We’ve essentially created highly specialized little professionals and then asked them to clock out of their instincts at the front door.

Your herding dog wants to herd. Your terrier wants to chase. Your guardian breed might be a little suspicious of strangers. Those tendencies didn’t come out of nowhere, and they’re not necessarily signs of a training failure.

Genetics, breed tendencies, individual temperament, and learning history all influence how a dog experiences the world. Two dogs can grow up in the same home, receive the same training, and still respond to the exact same situation very differently.

Our job isn’t to pretend those differences don’t exist. It’s to understand the dog in front of us and teach them the skills they need to navigate the world we ask them to live in.

So, are lions actually easier to train than dogs?

Well, that’s probably a discussion for another day (and perhaps a couple Redbulls).

But I do think it’s worth remembering that we’re asking a LOT of our dogs. We’re asking them to live in our homes, follow our rules, ignore their instincts, tolerate our grooming routines, navigate our social expectations, and coexist peacefully with a world that often makes very little sense to them.

And we’re asking them to do all of this while being really, really good at sitting.

So the next time your dog struggles with a training exercise, take a breath. Consider the environment, the motivation, the difficulty of the task, and what you’re actually asking them to do.

Remember: our dogs aren’t failing at being humans. They’re succeeding at being dogs. And our job is to help them succeed in our world, too.

At least you don’t have to brush their mane.