Are westies hard to train

Answer 1

I attended a weekly Dog Training session for my dog for 10 weeks. I found it quite easy to train him. He was able to learn most of the commands (eg. sit, heel, down, stay) within 3 days.

It helps if your westie is food-motivated. I have seen dogs (especially maltese) who don't like to eat treats, and thus are hard to train.

It also depends on how dedicated you are in training it. If you only work with it once a week, it's going to take ages to learn. You have to work with it for 30 min to 1 hour a day, not more than 1 hour, not less than 30 min. We don't want it to work too hard and waste all its energy on training, but we don't want it to be under-trained as well.

Another factor is the dog itself. There's a hierarchy in a pack of dogs when they are born. I heard that when dogs are born, they like to sleep on top of one another. So usually the "top dog" will tend to be more stubborn and unwilling to learn. The "top dog" will hence be hard to train, and also sometimes hard to rear as a pet. Fortunately for me, my westie is probably at the bottom, since he's pretty good-natured. It depends on your luck, because you can't really see the hierarchy in the dog's enclosure in the pet shop.

Sorry for a lot of redundant information.

I heard from my trainer that some of the westies he has helped to train are quite difficult to handle, due to their stubborn personality. Females will be better to handle, but there is not much difference between the 2 genders in terms of difficulty.

Like I said, it depends on your luck on the personality of your dog.