The neighborhood kids wait for their big yellow school bus, right outside my front door every morning during the week. Supervision of young beagles in the front yard during this time is a must. I discovered this a few days after I moved in, when from the front window, I watched as my young neighbor, Ruthie reached into her lunchbox, pulled out a thick, round slice of minced ham and hurled it across the yard like a Frisbee, right into the waiting mouth of my very happy beagle. A few days later, I was outside with the dogs at school bus time when Ruthie came skipping down the sidewalk, her mother not far behind. Ruthie ran into the yard, gave Jessie Beagle a hug and a pet and quickly introduced Jessie to her mother. During that introduction, I heard her say, “Jessie really likes me.
I have just been involved in yet another tedious discussion with other trainers about their defense of using overly forceful methods to train a dog. Tedious because there was a time when I had thought that many of these rationales were long buried in the past, and it’s hard and annoying to travel along those lines of discussion once more.
The problem is, in my opinion, that there is no consistent measure of how much is too much pressure to put upon an animal in training. Therefore, when you find yourself in these arguments you never really know your opponent’s perceptions, or what they really mean when they say that they “use tiny “nicks” with an e-collar”, or “barely yank” with a choke chain. Unfortunately, I’ve seen for myself that there can be a huge gap between what someone is saying, and what it really means (from my own perception, at least).
I attended my first dog training conference in early 2000. I’d been teaching obedience with a local club for a few years, had a read a ton of books, belonged to more training listservs than I could count, and had rehabilitated a couple of fosters and a dog I adopted for aggression issues. I fancied myself quite the expert on dog behavior, and I wasn’t shy about sharing my opinions. I went to the conference because I couldn’t make any progress with another aggressive dog that I was working with. Nobody local could help me, so I sought the advice of people whose books I’d been reading.
Winter's fierce snows have taken over to the point of absurdity and my limited time for my precious walks have been taken over by incessant shoveling. Here's how I deal with the cabin fever that starts to hit when I'm exhausted from my labor and the dogs are just cold watching me wondering why we're staying by home base!
Even though we spend a lot of time studying, discussing, and dissecting learning theory and various training methods, the fact of the matter is, training dogs really isn't rocket science. It would be ludicrous to suggest that any one, specific training method is the only way or even the right way to train in terms of getting a dog to perform a certain behavior. However it would be equally ludicrous to suggest that the methods we use and manner in which we get a dog to perform a behavior is not going to have consequences and repercussions, not only to the dog, but to the relationship we have with him. I've always considered it my good fortune to have experienced the progression of dog training and to have utilized many different methods and tools.
