What the Canine Good Citizen test is
The Canine Good Citizen test is the American Kennel Club’s certification for everyday good manners. It is ten short items, run by an AKC Approved Evaluator, and your dog either does each one or doesn’t. There is no score and no ranking: it is a pass, and a title your dog keeps.
It is deliberately unglamorous. Nothing in it is a trick. Every item is something a dog has to do in ordinary life: meet a stranger without jumping, be groomed by somebody who isn’t you, walk past a group of people, stay put when asked, and be left with a stranger for three minutes without falling apart.
Our Curriculum Director, Michael Rollins, is an AKC Approved CGC Evaluator. The test itself is run by the AKC through approved evaluators, so where and when you take it is arranged separately from this course.
The test is run on leash, with a buckle or martingale collar or a body harness. Food and toys are not allowed during the test itself, which is why so much of this course is about fading the food out rather than just getting the behavior to happen.
How this course lines up with it
Puppy Foundations was not built backwards from the test, but it covers all ten items, because the test is a list of the same things any dog needs. What follows is the map: each test item, what the evaluator is actually watching for, and the exercises in this course that build it.
Before any of it, the fundamentals. Every item on the list assumes your dog already understands the marker, will take food politely, and will follow a lure. If those four exercises are shaky, everything downstream is harder than it needs to be.
One general note on readiness: the test allows no food and no toys. Work each exercise until the behavior holds when your hands are empty, then you are testing at the level the evaluator will see.
The rest of this guide
- Before the ten items: the fundamentals
- 1. Accepting a friendly stranger
- 2. Sitting politely for petting
- 3. Appearance and grooming
- 4. Out for a walk
- 5. Walking through a crowd
- 6. Sit and down on cue, and staying in place
- 7. Coming when called
- 8. Reaction to another dog
- 9. Reaction to distraction
- 10. Supervised separation
- Working toward the test
The full guide, and the step-by-step video exercises it pairs with, is included with Puppy Foundations, our at-home puppy course. A few minutes a day, from first steps to confident manners.
Free: the housetraining plan
The routine we give every puppy family, as a printable PDF with a one-page sheet for the fridge.
