If you’re wondering whether your dog trainer is honest about his training, ask him or her to tell you about their mistakes as well as their successes.

On social media, nobody seems to ever make a mistake, but dog training is not a precise art, it almost never flows on a straight line. The best trainers, like the best hitters in baseball, fail almost as much as they succeed.

I don’t share the extreme view that Cesar Milan is an abusive, cruel dog handler. I think he is smart, and generally on the money when it comes to showing dog leadership.

But no matter how many times you might watch him, you will never see him fail.

The people watching him fall under the TV spell, and think him a superhero. But you don’t see his failures, and you don’t see the small army of people helping him out, you don’t see the dogs he can’t train and won’t try to train.

The idea is for you to see his wondrous feats, conclude that you are too stupid or weak to train a dog, and go buy his best selling books on “How To Have A Perfect Dog,” talking about setting the bar out beyond the moon.

No wonder so many people give up on training their dogs.

This morning, my heart sank a bit when we took Fate out to the sheep, as it sometimes does.

Fate comes from champion herding stock, her mother and father were herding dogs from Wales. She has an amazing amount of instinct and drive, yet when she comes up to the sheep, she loses heart and focus and backs away at the first sign of challenge, or even indifference.

From the very first time out, she was afraid of the sheep, she never wanted to get too close to them, she turned away and ran when they glared at her or moved towards here. I couldn’t help but contrast this to my border collie Rose, who was working the sheep when she was six months, getting close, charging and nipping, asserting her authority.

Perhaps I started her too young or didn’t encourage her enough.

I should get over this, and I dearly love Fate. But it still gets to me sometimes. I find myself wanting to apologize to her for screwing up her training and altering her destiny.

Dr, Karen Thompson, the wonderful breeder and trainer who gave us Fate, was direct with me. Fate should have been a wonderful herding dog, she had all of the instincts. Karen knows her stuff. That’s when I realized it was my fault, not Fate’s.

Fate is a wonderful dog, she’s Maria’s very faithful and loving companion, a great dog for her, a perfect dog in many ways, smart, beautiful, hardy and affectionate.

She can definitely do some good work as a therapy dog, although I don’t know if I will be able to get her certified. We do some heavy-duty therapy work – hospice elder care – and I have a zero-tolerance for any kind for mistakes.

Sometimes, Fate gets a little too excited. We’ll see if I can calm her down.

I think Fate was perhaps my biggest training mistake, and I have made many. Orson was a wildly arousable dog, and I could never settle him down, and when he bit three people,  including one child seriously.

I put him down, to the howls of the pure and the zealous, and after spending many thousands of dollars.

Never again.

I messed up her herding train. I couldn’t move as quickly as I needed to move, and I failed to see what it was she needed to build her confidence and settle.

Fate is also a highly arousable dog, and it seemed to me she just didn’t have the heart to challenge the sheep the way Red and the other border collie’s I trained did.

She just didn’t want to do it, yet she is intensely focused on the sheep, has tremendous instinct and extraordinary energy and speed.

She has every quality you would want in a border collie, except she has no interest in making them do what she needs and wants them to do, or what we need them to do.

Red kept the sheep away from Maria when she was out feeding the donkeys, he was a fair master to them. If they challenged or butted him, he would nip them sharply once on the nose, their most sensitive spot, and after a while, none of them dared to challenge him.

None of them pay attention to Fate, she doesn’t try to move them and turns away at the slightest challenge. She’s a great dog and we love her, yet I feel she was a training failure of mine – an amazing herding dog like that should certainly be able to herd sheep.

I’ve trained several border collies to herd sheep, and nobody ever needed to encourage Rose to make the sheep obey. She came with that lesson learned, even at six months.

I like to tout my successes, but I also need to chronicle my failures. Training is not an absolute, black-and-white thing. There are always successes and failures. The trick is to learn from the failures and emphasize the successes.

Don’t give them a chance to fail. Speak slowly, carefully and in a few words. Make yourself clear. Imagine the outcome you want, and be calm and positive. Train in short and upbeat bursts, several times a day.

I call that visualization, and it works for me.

If it doesn’t work, try it again, and again. The behaviorists will tell you that unless you’re training a Lab with liver treats, it takes about 2,000 repetitions for a dog to internalize a behavior or command. If there’s food, it takes the Lab about 30 seconds. If there’s sheep, it takes the border collie above five seconds.

When we got Fate, we decided she shouldn’t be a herding dog at all. When I saw her instinct, I changed my mind.

Fate is a happy and a much-loved dog, exactly the dog Maria wanted and needs and loves. It can’t really turn out much better than that, for her or us. Yet when I see her in the above photo, in this class border collie crouch, my heart does sink a little bit.

I see it as of my most pronounced failures as a trainer. Now, time to let it go.