i was reading over this thread and some parts stuck out to me from my own experiences...the responses were pretty early on, but i thought maybe my experience could be of help...
Renee:
If you try to dissuade him from things you don't want him to do by offering a treat, even if it's in exchange for sitting, he just thinks you're pleased with the behaviour and you've reinforced that behavior - exactly the opposite effect from what you're trying to accomplish.
this happened with my golden, penny. whenever we'd go out on walks, she'd jump all over us, snipping, etc., so my mom started carrying treats with her on walks, and would use them to bribe penny to stop. as soon as penny saw the treat (or eventually after she caught on, once my mom started reaching for her pocket where the treats were kept) she'd stop and sit down. but once she'd eaten the treat, she'd start the whole jumping routine all over again, so it just became a trick for her. we stopped carrying treats with us and walked her in the field behind our house instead of the neighborhood, and now she's great on walks, no more jumping!!
next...
caesar
What is interesting in my case, is that my dog, Caesar, has complete respect for my husband (kind of like your trainer). But, I have learned this is because my husband does not let our dog get away with anything, and our dog knows this. I am sometimes too soft, and so I think Caesar knows that he can push things farther with me. Perhaps your dog knows that the trainer means business and will not put up with any antics, where with you, he thinks it's playtime.
after we had to put our first dog to sleep, we knew we wanted another dog, so we thought we would adopt a grown dog from the SPCA or newspaper ads so we wouldn't have to go through the whole training process. there was a family who had three labs (a black one, a yellow one, and a chocolate one, my mom called them neopolitan labs, one of each flavor!!) who had just moved into a new house that was really close to the interstate, and they didn't want to have to invest in a fence to prevent their dogs from running away and getting hit by cars, so they were giving them away to approved families. we thought this was great, so we went and saw the dogs, the only one left was a yellow lab, scotch (4yrs old), and we liked him and ended up taking him home with us. we noticed, however, at the owner's home that he didn't listen to anybody except the father of the house, but we just assumed it was because he had a whole new territory to explore and was more interested in his new surroundings. we took him home and he seemed to like it a lot. since it was during the summer, when i woke up in the mornings, my parents would be at work, so i was home alone and one morning i got up and went into our living room and scotch was up on the couch (no dogs on the furniture in our house!!). i told him "scotch, down" and used my arm to point him down on the floor and he growled at me and since i didn't really know this dog, i had no idea of his past i didn't know how far he would go, and since i was at home alone i didn't want to risk it, so i left him be. (i know that wasn't a great move in terms of training... but given the circumstances...). later that week we were playing fetch with scotch and our neighbors in the field between our house and our neighbors and scotch had gotten the ball and one of the little boys (i think he was like 7 at the time) tried to get the ball out of his mouth and scotch bit him on the face. now to sum up this story (sorry didn't think it was going to be this long!!!) [
B]we figured out that he would only listen to dominant male figures. so i'm guessing with the couch incident he was trying to secure his place in the pecking order, but we continued to see that he wouldn't listen to my mom and i, only to my dad and bro; the same in the previous owners. so yea i think that could be why your dog was listening to the trainer/husband in your situations...[/B] happenned to us too!! so we ended up giving him back to his other owners, and we decided the best route was to start all over again and we got penny!! lol
sorry that story ended up being so long, but i hope it showed the whole dominance issue particularly...