Episode 51 - Teaching Show Puppies to Sit: Will The Real Show Stack Please Stand Up?

8/11/2026

This episode’s question is about teaching show prospect puppies to sit:

“What do you do with your show prospects for stacking? I am worried about the puppy automatically sitting in the ring and for the judge …”

Direct answer - we teach all of our puppies to sit, and we’re on our ninth generation of homebred champions, so it’s safe to say it has not held any of them back.

But the bigger question is, why is this still a question?

Not only will teaching your puppy to sit or mand not hold him back, it will help him stack more confidently in the ring.

Putting aside the actual merits of the dog as a specimen of their breed, there has never been a champion-worthy dog that did not get their championship because they could not learn how to stack or move around the ring at home.

But there are thousands and thousands that never got their championship because of profound behavioral issues, stress at shows or refusal to be handled by a judge.

Teaching your dog to communicate with you through manding, and teaching him some operant tricks to call on when he’s feeling pressured, can boost your puppy’s confidence when he really needs it. That tackles a much more real threat to your puppy’s show career than the outside chance that he might sit in the ring.

Tune in for more conversation about how and why teaching your show puppy to sit and even (gasp) sniff will make him a better show dog.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts, and subscribe so you never miss an episode!

To read the transcript for this episode, click the link below.

Transcript - Episode 51

I'm Jane Messineo Lindquist., and this is a Puppy Culture Potluck podcast. You bring the topics, we bring the conversation.

This episode's question is about teaching show prospect puppies to sit. And here's the question.

What do you do with your show prospects for stacking? I'm worried about the puppy automatically sitting in the ring for the judge. I get that I can teach stand or stack. But I'm curious what you've done.

Okay, me again, it's not going to be a plot spoiler for me to say I teach my puppies how to sit. From the time they're tiny baby puppies. We do Manding and we do sitting. We do Attention is the Mother of Behaviors. We do rally. We do everything with our puppies starting at four weeks old. We start training them.

We are on our ninth generation of home bred champions. So this practice has not held us back at all in the show ring. But you know, it's one of those things. It's such a persistent question and the evidence is so overwhelming. It's everywhere. Readers do everything with their dogs and have no trouble with the dog sitting in the show ring.

But yet that question persists. So what I'd like to do in this episode is answer the question directly, because there are people who maybe are newer that really are truly wondering if teaching your puppy to sit will ruin his show stack. But I'd also like to try and get a little bit behind and like, dig deeper into the answer and not just like, yeah, you can do it here. Look, I do it all the time, but exactly the mechanics of why. Not only is it possible to train all these things simultaneously, but beneficial.

So let's just start with this. Putting aside the actual merits of the dog as a specimen of their breed, there has never been a champion worthy dog that didn't get their championship because they couldn't learn how to stack or move around the ring at home.

But there are thousands and thousands that never got their championship, even though they were gorgeous dogs. Because of profound behavioral issues, stress at shows, or refusal to be handled by a judge. Now, some of those behavioral issues are genetic. And those dogs are rightly excluded from being champions. But in my observation, that's a very small proportion of the overall show failures.

Most dogs are temperamentally sound for their intended purpose, but under prepared and under socialized for the rigors of a dog show.

Dog shows are an unnaturally demanding environment. And a dog has to be well-prepared behaviorally to meet those challenges that that environment presents. Same thing, frankly, with any dog sport. When I used to do Pigs Fly training seminars, my seminars were packed with dogs who could do 200 heeling at home but simply could not do it in public. They were distracted, stressed, fearful, or over aroused.

That was my stock in trade, as a seminar presenter, the perfectly trained dog that simply could not do it at a trial. The ultimate takeaway is the behaviors, even fairly complicated behaviors, are easy to teach. Getting your dog to do it in public not so easy. Yeah, there is a cohort of dogs that are just so happy go lucky that they can, without any previous experience or socialization, walk into a dog show or obedience trial for the first time at six months old and knock it out of the park.

But that's not the majority of dogs, and I don't think that's a reasonable expectation or a reasonable yardstick for your breeding program. I mean, it's awesome. It's a virtue. I would breed the heck out of a dog that could do that, but in my opinion, it's not a reasonable expectation. So I'm asking you to take it as a fundamental truth that behavioral soundness and socialization is 90% of a successful show or performance dog.

The actual behaviors is probably only about 10% of it. And if you're willing to take that as true, then it becomes self-evident that teaching any behavior is really an afterthought. It's icing on the cake of a well socialized and behaviorally sound dog. So first I'm going to talk about why teaching your puppy to sit or mand won't ruin his show stack.

And then I'm going to talk specifically about why teaching your dog to mand and also cross training in other sports, including sniffing sports, will turbocharge your dog's show career. Before I jump in, I did write an article on this topic and it has video in it. It's called Will the Real Show Stack please stand up? We'll put that link up on the show page at madcapradio.com, or you can find it by going to puppyculture.com under the useful Information section. Go to the link for articles and you'll find it there. I highly recommend the article both for yourself and because it's a great, non-confrontational thing to have in your back pocket that you can share with someone who's telling you not to train your puppy to sit because your puppy's a show prospect. So now let's put this to bed.

Allowing or teaching your dog to sit, will not ruin his show stack. Period. It's not an issue. And I'm going to tell you why.

What it boils down to is this. There are two ways to prepare your dog for the show ring. The traditional approach is a reductive one. So all behaviors other than standing are corrected until the dog's left with only one option, which is to stand. So the finished behavior is not sitting or moving, which is very different from stacking. But on some level it does achieve the same thing. The dog does not sit or move.

Now our approach is to actually teach the behavior of stack. We start when they're five weeks old. We click treat for stillness without regard to head or foot position. Then we walk up to a freeze and then we refine foot and head positions, starting with the front feet and ending with the rear.

The finished behavior is a dog that wants to stack, looks for opportunities to stack, and has a pleasant, conditioned emotional response to stacking. In my experience and observation, this is the most direct way to get a sparkling and confident performance from your dog in the show ring. Now, some of you may be thinking, what's the difference? It just seems easier not to let the dog do anything except stand.

And in some sense that's true because that requires zero thought training or planning on the part of the handler. You just correct anything that's not a stand. Anybody can do that. The fundamental flaw with that logic is that if you do it that way, you're training a completely different behavior than the person who shapes a stack. The not sitting and stacking behaviors are an example of what I call behavior homophones.

The two behaviors look similar. As both the dogs are standing, but in reality they could not be more different. One is not moving for fear of correction, and the other is stacking apples and oranges and stacking is a much more direct route to a dog who shows as if he owns the ground he stands on. Once the dog understands stack as a behavior, the fact that he happens to also know the behavior sit is not going to make him any more or less likely to stack when cued to do so.

So I'm going to leave that piece there, because the article that I wrote with the videos in it covers it really well. And we also documented the process in our three part show training series, starting with one litter of puppies at five weeks old and following through to their grand championships. So you just can't argue with me. We're on our ninth generation of home bred champions from champions and Grand Champions, and every one of them had titles before and after their names.

And they all started both performance and conformation training at five weeks old. And I happened to breed possibly the most difficult to train dogs in the world. So I think we can say that's dispositive. Sitting is not going to ruin your show stack. But what about the actual benefits of teaching your puppy to mand or to sit? Circling back to the beginning, fear, stress, and behavioral issues are going to be much bigger challenges for you than teaching your puppy how to stack.

And as I've often mentioned, there's a deep connection between agency and fear. Bottom line the more agency you can give your puppy, the more he feels he's heard in any given situation, the less panic and fear he will feel. And Manding is the bedrock foundation of that agency. The puppy has a way to communicate his needs to you and he feels heard.

I'm not saying that your puppy is going to mand in the show ring, and that will alleviate his fear or stress. What I'm saying is, when you walk into a potentially stressful or fearful situation with a puppy that understands that you hear him, he's going to trust you more and feel less panic when things become uncomfortable. So it's not a direct correlation like Manding is some kind of release valve.

It's more of an ambient feeling of self-efficacy for the puppy. And as someone who's worked with many clients and their stressed or fearful, dogs, I will tell you that calling on operant behaviors, foundation behaviors that the dog is learned can pull the dog out of the fight or flight, stressed part of their brains and put them back in the calm and thinking part of their brains.

So if you get into a show ring and your dog is wiggy, having a portfolio of tricks to call on, you can sort of talk him off the ledge of panic, sit down, wave, paw shake, nose touch the hand, spin. All those little pet tricks can be extremely powerful in this context. But if you haven't trained anything and only ever corrected your dog for doing anything but stand there, that dog is like out in the middle of an open field, tethered in place, exposed to all the perceived dangers in the entire world.

Which dangers? Trust me. Puppies may visualize vividly when taken to a dog show. So that puppy is just going to sit in the panic part of his brain, with no option to move into the rational part of his brain, and it will spiral down from there. So that's two ways that teaching a mand and a sit, because they're not the same thing.

I'm not going to go over that again in this podcast, but having some of these behaviors and understandings with your puppy gives him a sense of agency. So he's more confident. He trusts you more, and he's less likely to panic under the extreme social pressure of something like a dog show.

And although I was not asked, I'm also going to touch on odor detection sports. Odor detection sports, please. Yes. Do this with your puppies, please. Yes. Let your dog sniff on walks. Take your dog for a sniff. It will improve your show stacking and your obedience, rally, agility work whatever you want to do. The dog that's locked into a visual mode is a dog that's not in a good place.

When you see your dog or puppies stiff, scanning, looking around, won't sniff or take food, that's like a five alarm stress fire. When a dog gets into his nose, puts his head down and starts sniffing, he's at least now moved past visual. He can start taking in his environment and understanding on a deep level. What's going on. You may not want your dog to be sniffing at that exact moment, but you have to understand it's his way of assimilating his stress and the environment, and it represents a level better past the visual level.

Listen, the only way out is through, okay? And you just you have to let the dog sniff. You have to let him assimilate his environment. I have a rule. When I take my dog to a new venue, the first walk is on me. The second walk is on you. So the first walk I take them at a dog show, at an agility trial rally, whatever it is I walk, they don't have to pay any attention to me. I want I encourage them to sniff everything. Take it in. If I see my dog dropping their nose and sniffing at stuff, this is fantastic. It means they're comfortable. They're in olfactory, I love it. I put them in their crate, usually for at least 15 minutes if I can, but more like an hour if possible.

And then I take them out again. And as I say now, this walk is on you dog. So now I'm looking for attention. I'm working for the dog to be giving me operant behaviors. I'm looking for the dog to work again, not a course level discussion of this, because I don't do that with an eight week old puppy or a 12 week old puppy, or a 16 week old puppy.

I work up to this, but my point here is that there should be a place in your sort of warm up routine where this dog is allowed to be in total olfactory. Getting your dog out of visual and into an olfactory mode is a basic stress reduction tool. We use it all the time with reactive dogs. Pam Dennison's Feed the Chickens Move is based on this scatter treats and let the dog sniff them out.

It keeps them from that vigilance scanning that just tends to feed itself and builds up into a bigger and bigger ball of stress and reactivity. So teaching your dogs to never gate their world by sniffing and teaching them that, yes, this is aloud and a thing we do when we get to a new place. It's an amazing tool to have in your pocket.

My youngest dog has not been to any kind of training class at all, except for show handling and nose work class, and she got her nose work level one title at just over a year old and finished her championship the same month, going Best of Variety at Specialty shows out of the classes. So I highly recommend starting some kind of odor detection work, even just for fun classes as early as possible. It's a great way for puppies to learn to be solid in new environments.

So I want to read some of these comments. Here's an interesting one along the same lines.

My litter is hopefully full of conformation prospects. I'm very hesitant to reward a sit while mending, but love that the puppies learn to communicate in this phase. Would there be any harm in rewarding a stand, pause, eye contact instead of a sit?

What a great question. I mean, here's the thing. We use sit for a moment. Not because it's more meaningful for the puppy, but because it's easier for the human to read. Okay, so you got your puppy out in public and the puppy's trying to get someone's attention, and they're just standing there. The people are not going to understand this is a request.

A sit, I mean, it looks like the dog is asking for something. I mean, there's nothing magical about the sit behavior. You could teach the dog a paw wave if you are insane, you could teach a bark. But I just find sit to be an easy behavior for the people and the dog to understand.

Now again, I just want to distinguish Manding from auto sit. Because auto sit is a default, you cannot get any resources from me until you sit. That's a top down rule, okay? It's not Manding, which is a forward request. An upward request from the puppy. Okay. It's a puppy forward request. The puppy is saying, you know, I would really like something. Right now I'm sitting and I'm asking for it.

And then you as a person might sometimes gratify that wish. Sometimes you don't. But the puppy understands he's being heard, and that's what really matters in this context. Not really whether he gets the thing or not. So very different from you can never access me unless you do something. It's not a pre Mach principle. Here's another one.

Dog forbid a pup sits in the ring. Actually, I've asked my puppy to sit in the ring, especially in a large class or best of breed. I'd rather her be able to sit and conserve that mental and physical energy than get lazy, and the judge catches a not so stellar look at her.

Wow, this is me. What a great comment, right? Because I am exactly on her page. If the judge can see my puppy, either they're seeing my puppy lying down or doing tricks, or just sitting in my lap or being cute, or that puppy's on. Okay, because you do get the judge that we call the look back judge where they're going to be taking a peek just randomly from time to time. Just turn around and take a peek at the lineup.

And if you got one of those judges and you're just making your puppy stand there for a half an hour in a big class or group, and your puppy's topline is sagging and your puppy's getting fussy, that's not a good look. So going in the corner, playing with your puppy, teaching some tricks, doing some puppy massage. These are all great things.

And then several people chimed in and said, yep, they use the groups to teach tricks. And you know, it's not just the super experienced people that can pull this off. Here's someone who wrote in:

We are new to showing this year, and I had heard that and ignored it because you should be able to teach both separately as a skill. Sit is the first thing we teach our dogs. They have an auto set. We have not sat once in the show ring.

Here's a great one.

My dog's a grand champion bronze and a Grand Champion. Learn to stack very early per kill or free stacks. And now it's one trick or behavior amongst many that I will ask them to do. And we will absolutely do a bunch of tricks in the group ring while waiting our turn. We have some behaviors with hand signals stack and sit included and they totally know the difference. Have we occasionally had one of them manned to ask for bait while in the ring? Yup. But I always feel that's on me pushing my dog beyond what we've practiced.

Or maybe my cadence for time between rewards was too long. Anyway, I love this because I've been saying for ages that I don't understand the whole “don't teach a show dog to sit” thing. It doesn't credit the dog with enough intelligence to understand the difference between behaviors and doing different things in different contexts. No one is going to tell me that my girl doesn't understand when she's in the show ring and when she isn't.

The fact that she will drag me ring side, play up ring side like a total sassy pants, and then turn on the focus as soon as she crosses the threshold into the ring. Makes it very clear that she knows exactly what's happening.

And then this comment.

Let's be honest though, when young and the first few times in pressure situations, that is to say, the show ring, a dog will default to certain behaviors.

And if sitting has been the most reinforced behavior or the behavior that the dog feels most safe in, they're going to sit. It happens. It's normal. It will not cost them a championship if everything else is there. Young green dogs will sit, no matter how well trained they are at stacking.

Okay. Me again. Yeah, like I say in the article and also in the videos with the article. A puppy that sits occasionally presents, you know, a puppy-ish good picture. It's a loved pet. Nobody's going to put this puppy, not put the puppy up because it's sat in the ring, but circling all the way back to the beginning, if you punish that puppy for sitting, if you don't let that puppy sit, if you don't have some tricks and operant behavior to call on, yeah, that might cost you your championship with that dog.

So I sure hope this helped some of you feel more comfortable about teaching your show puppies how to sit. We had a couple of people right in saying that, you know, they did teach their puppies to mand, but with some trepidation, they were worried, especially at eight weeks, how it was going to work out. But it worked out for all of them.

If you want to learn more about how we trained our puppies, we do have a show training bundle, Killer Free Stacks, Stack And Deliver, and Winning in Motion. And this is a litter of puppies that we filmed. As I mentioned before, from five weeks old through to Grand Championship. So it you know, it's just positive proof that this can be done.

If you liked this podcast, you'll love our bundles. We have bundles for Show Puppies. We have bundles for pet puppies. We have breeder bundles. We have puppy owner bundles. Check them all out at puppyculture.com. Breeders. Have you stocked up on your booklets? Puppy exercise booklet for your puppies Advocate booklet and the Spay Neuter booklet all available at puppyculture.com.

Well, that's it for this time. Thanks for listening. Bye bye.