Valerie Pollard

I've noticed a disconcerting trend on the professional email lists lately. It seems that whenever someone asks a question regarding an unwanted behavior, all of the answers tippy-toe around various ways to manage the issue or how to prevent the dog from engaging in it rather than ever giving any solutions that might actually resolve the problem. Don't get me wrong - every trainer *should* know how to prevent and manage all sorts of issues, this comes right along with being a competent trainer. But shouldn't they also know how to use training to hopefully resolve the problem as well?

For example, just recently a question was asked regarding a large adolescent dog who was randomly jumping up on the back of his elderly, medically compromised owner: not a good thing. Something that could, in fact, result in that owner not being able to keep their dog. The responses ranged from:

a) tether the dog on a bed with a chew toy

I always wondered how and why I might stop training dogs.  Working as a trainer is something I've always loved to do and no matter how I envisioned it, I couldn't think of any reason I would stop unless perhaps just getting too old and decrepit might put an end to it!  Now I know that sometimes Life has a trick or two hidden up its sleeve that you wouldn't have expected, and that those hands you are dealt, though they might look really good on the flop, sometimes end up surprising you before the hand is over.

I'm writing this in response to a discussion on a dog trainer's list that occurred recently.  As most doggy people know the use of crates as a form of dog management has increased monumentally over the last two decades.  Back in the day people used dog runs or cages to put their dog in for various reasons - but you wouldn't have seen crates sitting in bedrooms, kitchens, living rooms like you do now.  You wouldn't see so many dogs essentially living their lives in a crate until their owner comes home from work.
 
The crate can easily be misused - as so many dog trainers like to say, "It's not the tool, it's the fool".  Or, "any tool can be misused".  This is true and too many owners (and even many trainers, ouch!) see nothing wrong with confining a dog in a crate all day long and much of the night too.  "It's the quality time that matters", they say, "not the quantity".  I must disagree.

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).