Holistic Training and Philosophy

When I first started training dogs, I was very much of the alpha dog school of thought. I started out with dogs that were aggressive toward people and other dogs, and discipline worked quickly and effectively to stop it.

It also created anxiety, something I saw more and more as I learned dog body language. Having lived with depression and anxiety myself, it wasn’t a state I wanted to create in dogs.

So I worked with some local positive reinforcement trainers, and what I saw then was that, even though we weren’t working with extreme cases, over and over people were unable to put it into practice enough for it to be effective. I also saw dogs start having behavioral problems based off over-excitement; dogs that were supposedly Very Well Trained bouncing off the walls and being a pain to live with.

I did a lot of vacillating between the two for a lot of years, let me tell you. One was effective but caused stress and anxiety. The other was effective according to science, but only if you put a lot of time and energy into it; time and energy a lot of people don’t have.

This post isn’t about giving you the answer. More and more I’ve whittled methods down to the least aversive, most positive, while still being relatively quick and effective, balancing methods based on what the dog is telling me. You don’t get a lot of “one size fits all” training from me. I can’t tell someone, “If your dog is barking, this will work every time” because it depends on the dog. Why are they barking? Boredom? Okay, we can use a squirt bottle for that, but not so much that it stresses the dog out. Anxiety? We need positive reinforcement for that, but in a way that doesn’t reinforce the barking or take months and years before we get solid improvement.

More and more, this is what I learn: what your dog is saying is the most important thing you can learn. And it works. My results speak for themselves (although you can’t know that; all you have is my word, sadly).

I’m also doing a lot more of what I call guidance based training. I don’t expect a dog reacting to another dog to remember how to sit and calm down, so I use pressure cues to remind them: an upward tug on a leash (not enough to choke, but enough to lift their head) so that the change in their own body tells them what to do; something I find most dogs understand pretty rapidly. Not a punishment, because you have to get SO aversive that it becomes nearly abusive, and not positive reinforcement, because many dogs in that state will ignore it or it’ll make them more excited. Guidance. “Here is what I want you to do, and I’m going to be steady and consistent until you do it. When you do it, I’ll reward you.”

My success rate hovers around 95%, but what makes me happier is that the dogs I’m working with are coming out of their troubled behavior without looking stressed out or unhappy, and the owners are able to follow through well enough and long enough for it to work on the dogs. Maybe I need to coin my own term: guidance-based training. Except a lot of the time, it’s the dogs guiding me, telling me and their owners what they need in the moment.

What the world needs is ANOTHER term for dog training for people to fight about. (Yes, that’s sarcasm you see dripping off your screen.)

Jenna

No Bad Dogs

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