theclickerkid:

Found this video on what I thought was a good youtube channel, on ‘starting a dog on a prong collar with conversational leash work’.

He talks about the prong collar as a tool of conversation, not of force, and explains that this dog is stubborn and used to ignoring it.

When he starts the dog walking, dog is happy to go with him, and then the moment he feels that prong (1:49) he stops, tucks his tail, and licks his lips. He then begins to pant and slowly sinks to the ground. The trainer refers to this as ‘stubbornness that he’s used to’.

‘What important here is not to force the dog on. I’m a bigger animal than him, he knows that. That’s not the idea. I’m gonna put pressure on the collar, I’m gonna keep my energy going in the direction that I wanna go. And the moment that he gives in, just a little bit, I’m gonna give in a lot.’

And when the dog does move, yep, he drops the lead. A second later the dog is on the ground, licking his lips.

‘He needs to learn that his choices affect collar on the pressure, or not.’

‘What you are seeing is a dog who is very accustomed to getting his own way.’

The trainer goes on to acknowledge the dog’s body language, saying ‘Yes, he’s stressed. That’s inevitable. Things in life are going to occur where a dog is stressed. There’s sort of a fad these days that you want to shelter dogs from any kind of stress that could ever happen. That’s not only incredibly unrealistic but is incredibly foolish. Animals, humans – we all need to learn how to cope with stressors and learn that we can’t always get things our way. If you never address this resistance in the dog, it’s going to rear its ugly head somewhere.’

I didn’t watch the rest of the video, because it’s depressing as hell, but what’s really interesting to me is the similarities between this trainer’s approach and how everyone in the horse world trains.

They both refer to aversive pressure as ‘communication’. They both disregard stress in the animal, justifying their own stress based training by pointing out that stressors are naturally occurring and that the animal has to ‘get over it’. They both claim that the stressed animals are ‘stubborn’ and ‘only trying to get their way’. And they both place responsibility in the hands of the animal for its training (‘He needs to learn that his choices affect pressure’), smoothing over the fact that they are the ones applying pressure, they are the ones with the lead in their hand, and they are the ones purposefully subjecting the animal to stress and discomfort.

And what irritates me the most is the claim that positive trainers don’t address naturally occurring stress and fear. Nothing could be farther from the truth. One of the most useful uses of food in training is counter conditioning your animal. This not only removes undesirable behavior (kicking, barking, biting) as a reaction to stressors, but removes the stress altogether, by creating new positive associations. When my horse kicked out because I put a strange object on his back, I didn’t force him to ‘get over it’. I counter conditioned him until he realized that there was nothing to be frightened about. I didn’t have to escalate my horse’s stress or risk even more dangerous behavior.

The stress this man is subjecting this dog to is completely unnecessary, and his justification for it (and the horse world’s justification for their training) is completely ridiculous.