I’ll admit up front that I haven’t read “Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World’s Worst Dog” by John Grogan. I’ve tried a couple of times, but I just can’t get into it.

The book and subsequent movie have been huge successes. People apparently love reading about a yellow Labrador retriever that’s totally out of control and apparently untrainable. It may be that the story makes them feel good the same way a crime story about a woman who murders her children does. We read with a kind of horrified satisfaction, knowing that while our own children drive us nuts from time to time, we’re certainly in better control than that.

But Marley makes me uncomfortable, and, truth told, downright angry. Grogan has put away a tidy sum thanks to an ill-behaved dog and his own way with words, which is great for him but hurts a cause I believe in and put into practice every day.

That’s the notion that, generally speaking, it isn’t the dog that’s bad — a biter or even simply naughty in the Marley sense of the word — the problem lies with owners who have failed to take care of him properly. And when owners let their pets down that way, a tiny handful are saved by the pen of a skilled author. Too many simply become pests or, worse, biters, and too many end their days in animal shelters as their families discover they’re tired of living with an out-of-control dog.

Dogs, like kids, need to be taught how to behave. They need to learn how to behave around other dogs and how to behave when the doorbell rings. They must discover that food on a table or counter is not theirs, that “stay” means just that, that dog teeth and human flesh have no business ever coming into contact with one another. They need to learn that when an owner calls, you respond. Instantly.

That last one is a lifesaver, by the way. It’s the tool that allows you to turn a bolting dog away from the street or some other trouble. It’s one that has saved my own Siberian husky a couple of times when the lure of “anyplace but here” proved more than he could handle.

I’ll admit that my Siberian and I have gone well beyond pet manners when it comes to training. We take part in obedience competitions, and, nine years later, we still get lessons most weeks. We train virtually every day, sometimes only for a few minutes, sometimes for substantially more than that. Sunday, in fact, we’ll be meeting to work in a nearby park with several other like-minded friends.

Many of my dog-loving friends share my feelings about Marley, I discovered recently, and all for the same reason. We’ve put too much time and effort into our own dogs, and we’re too aware of the trouble problem dogs create, to be entirely comfortable with an animal that’s gained worldwide recognition for his misbehavior.

Most important, we recognize that Marley’s problems are not Marley’s fault. True, Grogan claims to have taken him to trainers only to discover that Marley apparently is incapable of learning. I doubt that. Dogs, like people, don’t learn overnight. And, like people, they have to get something good out of a behavior to keep it up. Owners can’t use treats to teach a dog to sit and, once the behavior’s learned, never again reward the animal for sitting when told to do so. If the dog doesn’t get a paycheck — treat or praise — from time to time, he’ll quit sitting. Ditto anything else we ask dogs to do in the name of becoming polite members of society.

Training dogs is like raising kids in many ways. It takes time, effort and endless repetition. The reward for the human is an animal that doesn’t embarrass us, ruin something or hurt someone. The reward for the dog is even greater. He knows where the boundaries are — something human kids want, too, and something adults take for granted. And, knowing about the boundaries, he’s likely to live a long and happy life, not wind up in a shelter and facing a very uncertain future.