Over the past few decades dog training has changed greatly in both the available knowledge and techniques. From the early force & discipline, to approaches now based on behavioral psychology and canine ethology, with research instead of guessing. While some of the old style dog trainers persist, many others have written about all that they have since learned and how they’ve changed, and that they now embrace true science when working with dogs.
However, as is often the case, people will both oversimplify and also take some things to an extreme. Many will look for simple rules to follow and take things that sometimes work and use them as universal rules to always apply. While some may study from full-sized texts with many hundreds of pages, others may read only the briefer books often written for dog owners. We can look through research studies, or we may only read the summary articles posted and giving an abbreviated view of the study. To gain more depth, we can read texts on applied and clinical behavioral psychology and canine ethology, or just read more articles on recipes for training techniques. Spend several years in study, or just 2-3 months on a dog training class, with only a week or two on behavior.
One of those directions will rather obviously give you far more depth, although the second one may actually give you more initials to follow your name.
Fortunately, most dogs are fairly easy to handle, and the larger challenges are often dealing with the dog owners. Due to this, most reasonable approaches will work most times with most dogs, although the time and work needed will vary widely with the approach. With my focus on rehabilitation and severe behavioral issues, I needed both more depth and much greater efficiency, often needing to accomplish in weeks what would ordinarily require months.
But we each have our limits. I know of people more knowledgeable than I in dealing with certain behavioral pathologies. I also know of some good dog trainers who have more skill than I in dealing with dog owners and influencing how they work with their dogs. Something that would be expected, as I primarily deal directly with unadoptable dogs.
But I’ve found so many dog trainers who not only fail to learn the basics, but become so defensive when asked questions that a real discussion is difficult or impossible. And from that, the following was collected.
Why it this so long? Because in a single sentence I can say:
Always train dogs using force-free positive reinforcement and no aversives.
But to explain all that’s wrong with that, we need many more pages, so select the next page below to see them.
