This Is the Hardest Dog Breed to Train

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Dec 9, 7:30AM EST

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This Is the Hardest Dog Breed to Train — © f8grapher / Thinkstock

The Pet Ownership & Demographic Study released by the American Veterinary Medical Association shows that about 63 million households have a dog. Ownership can be expensive. The average cost of a puppy is $1,300. The annual cost of owning most dogs is between $1,400 and $4,300. This includes food, toys, grooming and vet visits. Among the costs associated with dog ownership is training, in some cases.
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Dogs are trained at different levels. Some owners just want their dogs to sit and come when called. Training a “seeing-eye” dog to help a blind person takes well over a year of intensive training, and some of the dogs who begin these programs eventually are rejected.

24/7 Tempo picked the hardest dog breed to train. We certainly don’t want to deter anybody from getting a breed we considered as a pet. They have many wonderful and varied attributes, including loyalty, intelligence and playfulness. But to enjoy their better qualities requires addressing their more challenging ones, and that calls for careful training from an early age.
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To choose the hardest dog breeds to train, 24/7 Tempo compared listings of relative difficulty published by a number of specialist websites, including TopDogTips, PetCareRX, CertaPet and PuppyToob.

The hardest dog to train is the bullmastiff. As the name suggests, this breed is the result of bulldog and mastiff crosses. It was bred to guard country estates and game preserves from poachers. It is large, tipping the scale at up to 130 pounds, and is powerful and intimidating. As a result, the bullmastiff requires careful training.

Click here to see all the dogs hardest to train.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.