Seriously. You’re walking through the middle of the CBD. Buses everywhere. Trucks reversing. Air brakes going off. Uber Eats scooters shooting past. People dragging suitcases. Road-ragers blasting horns. A busker is playing music fifteen metres away. Hundreds of people are walking past. And sitting on the footpath is a homeless guy, with a Staffy mix next to him having the deepest damn nap of its life, like it just couldn’t give a shit.

 

Meanwhile, someone living in a quiet suburban house has spent three grand on puppy preschool, private training, enrichment toys, lick mats, calming music and seventeen different types of treats, and their dog has just had an existential crisis because somebody across the road opened an umbrella. Why?

 

I’ve thought about this a lot over the years, because it’s something I keep noticing. And no, before someone gets carried away, I’m not suggesting homelessness is an ideal lifestyle for a dog. There are obvious welfare concerns: access to veterinary treatment, exposure to extreme weather, financial limitations, food security in some cases. Plenty of things about homelessness are obviously not something we should be trying to recreate. I’m talking purely about behaviour.

 

Because there are aspects of that lifestyle that, completely unintentionally, create some incredibly well-adjusted dogs. And I think ordinary dog owners could learn something from that. Not because the homeless bloke sitting outside the Macca's secretly completed a Cert IV in Animal Behaviour. He probably didn’t. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that in most cases there is almost zero formal training technique involved. He’s just living with his dog, and that might be exactly why some things work so well.

 

That Dog Is Actually Living in the World

 

One of the biggest problems I see with puppy socialisation is that people have absolutely no idea what socialisation actually means. They think, “My puppy met two puppies this week,” or, “We had guests over,” or, “He met my neighbour’s Labrador.” Great. That is part of socialisation. It is nowhere near all of it.

 

Socialisation isn’t just meeting dogs and people. It’s learning how to exist in the world. Someone dragging a noisy wheelie bin past you, a truck reversing, a bus pulling up and releasing its air brakes, a motorcycle flying past, a kid on a scooter, a busker playing music, a shopping trolley hitting a bump, a man wearing something weird, a door slamming, construction noise, crowds, traffic, things falling over, people arguing, random shit happening for absolutely no reason. Things that humans barely even register because we’ve experienced them ten thousand times. Your puppy hasn’t.

 

And a lot of pet dogs are socialised in these incredibly sterilised little bubbles. Everything is planned, everything is controlled, everything is carefully introduced. Then one day the dog encounters something nobody thought to put on the socialisation checklist and absolutely loses its shit. A dog living on the street doesn’t get that luxury. It gets the actual world, every day, constantly. And after enough exposure, the world stops being particularly interesting.

 

That’s another thing I think makes an enormous difference: nobody makes everything a giant event. Imagine a dog hears a loud bang and jumps. In some homes, suddenly everybody is involved. “Ohhh, baby! It’s okay! Come here! You’re okay! It was just a noise!” Everybody’s body language changes. Everybody’s attention goes onto the dog. The entire room has now confirmed that yes, apparently, something significant just happened.

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I saw a perfect example of this years ago at a friend’s place. They had a Great Dane who was about seven months old at the time, so still basically a giant, lumbering idiot. He came flying around the corner from a carpeted room into a hardwood hallway, lost his footing and absolutely ate shit. Big dog, big noise, legs everywhere, but he practically bounced straight back up. I could see immediately that he was fine. So I was laughing. If I had to humanise what he looked like in that moment, he looked more embarrassed than anything, like he knew he’d just made a complete dickhead of himself. His body language told me "I'm about to run and bounce on you, because I have clearly started a fun social event". Either that, or, "I have to squash the witness"... But then the family came rushing in and he froze. Mum came flying out of her study, one of the girls ran over, dad came from upstairs, everyone started checking him, coddling him, making sure he was okay and generally treating it like he’d just narrowly survived some catastrophic event. And I genuinely watched this dog’s expression change from confused to, “Holy shit, I think I nearly died.” Fast forward about two weeks and they called me because he’d developed a fear of the hardwood floor. He was now walking down that same hallway pressed up against the wall because he was so terrified of slipping again. We managed to fix the issue, but it didn't need to become one. 

 

Compare that to a dog startling, the owner looking over and going, “Don’t be an idiot. Come on, bro,” and then just carrying on. That’s it. And the dog looks at the one individual it trusts more than anything else in the world and basically goes, “Well, he's not worried, so I guess we’re good.”

 

That doesn’t mean ignoring genuine fear. There is a huge difference between a dog being briefly startled by something and a dog being genuinely terrified. If your dog is experiencing actual fear, anxiety or distress that affects its welfare, then yes, we deal with that properly. But not every little hesitation needs to become an emotional support intervention. Sometimes the best thing you can communicate is: "that was weird (or awkward, or funny). Anyway. On we go."

 

Every time that happens, you build a little bit more resilience. I think of resilience almost like a muscle. Something unexpected happens, the dog checks with its human, the human doesn’t care, nothing bad happens, life continues. Repeat that hundreds or thousands of times and eventually the dog learns something much broader than “buses are safe” or “shopping trolleys are safe.” It learns that unexpected things aren’t automatically dangerous.

 

Eventually, when something genuinely unusual happens, instead of immediately melting down, the dog goes, “What the hell was that?” Looks at its human. Human is fine. Sweet. Back to normal. That recovery is hugely important. A well-adjusted dog isn’t necessarily a dog that never gets startled. It’s often a dog that recovers quickly.

 

The Relationship Is Probably the Biggest Part

 

For me, this is the biggest factor: the relationship. These dogs are often with their person almost constantly. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re lying under a doona together every night watching Netflix. It doesn’t mean the owner is constantly cuddling the dog or telling it how much they love it. But the dog knows one thing with absolute certainty: that person is there.

 

They move through the world together. They sleep near each other. They walk together. They experience things together. The human provides food, safety, direction, boundaries and familiarity. It’s almost complete devotion both ways. That matters.

 

And good relationships with dogs aren’t built purely through affection. They’re built through communication. Actual dog-to-human communication. Understanding what the dog in front of you is actually doing instead of projecting stupid human motivations onto it. No, your dog didn’t piss on the carpet because it has a grudge against you. No, it isn’t “getting even.” No, it isn’t sitting there plotting revenge because you went to work. Maybe it’s frustrated. Maybe it’s confused. Maybe it’s overstimulated. Maybe it’s anxious. Maybe it genuinely has no clue what the hell you expected it to do.

 

Understand the animal you actually own. A dog. Not a furry little person. And understand that this dog has its own personality. It isn’t the same as your previous dog. It isn’t your friend’s dog. It isn’t the dog from the YouTube video. And it doesn’t give a shit that some bloke on TikTok said his method works every time.

 

One advantage I suspect a lot of homeless dog owners accidentally have is that they simply don’t have the time or luxury to overindulge in seventeen competing dog-training philosophies. They learn their dog. They try something. It works. They keep doing it. Which brings me to something incredibly underrated: consistency.

 

I’d bet a lot of these owners couldn’t explain operant conditioning. They probably couldn’t explain reinforcement schedules. They may have absolutely no idea what trainers mean when we talk about thresholds or arousal or behavioural modification. But they know, “When my dog does this, I do this.” And then they do the same thing tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that.

 

The dog knows what to expect from them. That predictability is incredibly important. The world might be chaotic, but the relationship isn’t.

 

And yes, modern dog training absolutely can become unnecessarily complicated. I’m guilty of over-analysing things too. Sometimes I have to. Most pet dogs live lifestyles that make certain behavioural problems more complicated. If someone works nine to five and the dog spends a huge part of the day at home, I need to start thinking creatively about how we meet that dog’s needs: mental enrichment, nose work, food toys, puzzle activities, structured outings, things that compensate for what the dog’s everyday life doesn’t naturally provide.

 

But there are also trainers who turn incredibly simple problems into some sort of NASA launch procedure. Sometimes I’ll hear a solution that basically amounts to, “First you need to do X, then Y, then introduce Z, then countercondition A while reinforcing B…” and I’m sitting there thinking: "or… no. You can’t fucking bite that. Done."

 

That doesn’t mean every behavioural issue should be handled with “just tell them no.” Far from it. My dividing line is pretty simple. If the behaviour is being driven by genuine fear, anxiety, stress, discomfort or something that is meaningfully affecting the dog’s welfare, then let’s investigate it properly. Let’s take our time. Let’s work through it. But if your 50-kilogram dog is launching itself into Grandma because it’s excited to say hello? Mate. That’s just not on. Sometimes a boundary is allowed to just be a boundary.

 

They Don’t Have to Love Everything

 

I once saw a homeless guy’s dog stand up and rush toward Archer as we walked past. The bloke gave it a very firm, “Cut it out.” The dog stopped, and you could basically see the thought process: “Fine. You’re lucky my dad’s here.” The dog still didn’t like Archer. That’s important. It didn’t suddenly go, “Oh wonderful! Another dog! Friendship!” It just tolerated him.

 

And I think people massively underestimate the importance of tolerance. A well-behaved dog does not need to love everything. It does not need to love every dog, every stranger or every child. It doesn’t even necessarily need to feel emotionally neutral about everything. Sometimes a well-behaved dog is simply a dog that thinks, “I don’t particularly like this, but I know how to behave around it.” That is a completely reasonable standard.

 

We put an enormous amount of pressure on pet dogs to love everything. “It’s okay! He’s friendly!” “Go say hello!” “She loves dogs!” “Don’t worry, that’s our friend!” Who gives a shit? Maybe your dog doesn’t want another friend. The expectation doesn’t have to be “love everything.” It can simply be “behave yourself around everything.” Those are very different expectations.

 

A lot of people might also look at a dog spending much of its life on lead and think it has no freedom. And sure, I’d assume many homeless dogs aren’t getting hours of off-leash running through giant parks, but I think that misses something. Within the leash, they often have quite a lot of autonomy. They sniff, investigate, look around, stop, move and experience new smells constantly. They’re travelling through changing environments all day, so their brain is constantly doing something.

 

At the same time, impulse control is being practised constantly. You want to run over and see that dog? No. You want to chase that pigeon? No. You want to investigate that thing over there? Not today. Leave it, come on, let’s go. Nothing dramatic. No formal ten-minute impulse-control session. It’s simply woven into life. The dog learns from puppyhood that wanting something does not automatically mean getting it, and that isn’t cruel. That is an incredibly useful skill.

 

They’re Probably Tired Where it Counts... Mentally

 

This is another huge difference between these dogs and many suburban pets. A dog spending most of the day moving around a city is processing an enormous amount of information: smells, traffic, people, dogs, food, noise, movement, novel objects, changing locations, different surfaces, interactions, decisions. That is a lot of mental stimulation.

 

So when that dog lies down next to its owner in the middle of the city and falls asleep, it probably doesn’t require a fifteen-minute “settling protocol.” Its brain has actually had a day.

 

Most pet dogs don’t get that. And that’s not me blaming people for having jobs. People need to work. If everybody could dedicate three hours every single day to taking their dog on some enormous adventure, we probably wouldn’t need half the enrichment activities we currently recommend.

 

A lot of enrichment exists because we are compensating for lifestyles that don’t naturally give dogs enough to do. Puzzle toys, snuffle mats, food games, nose work. They’re useful. I use them constantly. But fundamentally they are artificial ways of recreating little pieces of the complexity dogs would otherwise encounter through a richer day-to-day life. A street dog often gets that complexity for free.

 

Something else I’ve noticed, at least here in Australia, is how often these dogs are Staffies or Staffy mixes, which I find particularly interesting because Staffies can be like a damn lucky dip. You might get a lazy couch potato whose greatest ambition is moving from one side of the lounge to the other, or you might get a hyperactive fence-jumping psycho who seems to have been manufactured entirely out of Red Bull. There’s a massive range.

 

But generally speaking, they’re resilient dogs. And they’re often incredibly people-focused, especially focused on their person. That probably makes them particularly compatible with this kind of lifestyle. And again, I think that says something interesting. These aren’t necessarily calm because somebody deliberately chose the easiest, lowest-arousal dog available. Some of these are exactly the kinds of dogs regular households struggle with.

 

Yet put that same general type of dog into a lifestyle filled with movement, environmental exposure, companionship, boundaries and constant interaction with its human and suddenly you can end up with a dog sleeping peacefully in the middle of absolute chaos. That’s worth thinking about.

 

No, I’m Not Saying Training Doesn’t Matter

 

Quite the opposite. Training matters enormously. The point isn’t that training is unnecessary. The point is that a great relationship and proper real-world exposure make training much easier.

 

For me, all three should start immediately: relationship, exposure and training. But relationship is number one. Always. Because if your dog genuinely trusts you, understands you, knows what to expect from you and sees you as its stable reference point in the world, everything else becomes easier. Training becomes clearer. Exposure becomes safer. Boundaries become easier to accept. Recovery becomes faster. Communication becomes less complicated.

 

And maybe that’s the part we sometimes lose when we turn dog ownership into a collection of training exercises. Dogs don’t experience their lives as twenty-minute sessions. They’re learning from us constantly: from how we react, from what we ignore, from what we allow, from what we stop, from whether we’re consistent, from whether our reactions make sense, and from whether we actually understand them.

 

So if there’s anything worth stealing from the homeless guy with the dog asleep in the middle of the CBD, it’s not his lifestyle. It’s this: get your dog out into the actual world. Let it experience things. Stop treating every noise, every stranger and every weird object like a training event. Be clear when something isn’t allowed. Be calm when something doesn’t matter. Pay attention when something genuinely does matter. And above all, build the kind of relationship where your dog looks at you when the world gets weird and thinks, “Well, you’re not worried, so I probably don’t need to be either.”

 

The homeless guy probably isn’t deliberately teaching his dog a sophisticated lesson in emotional resilience when a bus backfires and he says, “Come on, bro.” But the dog is learning one anyway. And after thousands of those tiny lessons, you get the dog lying asleep on the pavement while the entire CBD is chaotic around it.

 

Maybe instead of asking, “What training technique did he use?” we should occasionally ask, “What kind of life has that dog been living?”