About those words… Punishment, consequence, choice, structure, reinforce, strengthen…

All of these words have different meanings depending on your background, training, and where you’re coming from. Just because a word has a scientifically defined meaning doesn’t mean that it is the “right” definition; it depends who you’re talking to. A lay person definition is equally valid! look words up in the dictionary… That should clarify things for you. Words have multiple meanings.

The goal of language is to communicate and be understood. If your goal is to be understood rather than to be right, it’s critically important to know the different ways that these words are used. Not only their definitions, but their connotations.

If you have that understanding, you’ll have sensible conversations. If you don’t, you might be right all day long, but you won’t be understood.

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Do balanced trainers train (fix) dogs and positive reinforcement based trainers manage them? No. Not not at all. That’s a problem with words and definitions, not actual outcomes. Do balanced trainers show their work and positive reinforcement trainers not? No. You don’t know where to look. If you want to see really good positive reinforcement trainers doing cool things, you have to look in their circles.

That’s what I talk about here.

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Can dogs be willful? Can they actively choose to disobey, while understanding what you want?

Yes they can. Now what?

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Time. Priorities. Dog welfare. Human welfare. Guilt.

Dog trainers on social media seem out of touch with real world people and their priorities. Are we even doing our job if we don’t prioritize our human clients as much as their animals?

Those are things I covered here.

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No fetch? Chase but no return? No tug? Tugs but doesn’t let go?

Understand what motivates your dog makes training and problem-solving a lot easier. Taken further, it will set how you train each individual dog, which may be radically different than how you approached similar issues with the last dog.

By comparing my Border Collie Ice and my Belgian Xen, both showing similar issues but with very different resolutions, I hope to illustrate these points in this live.

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Trial analysis. What went right? What went wrong? And what am I going to do about it?

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It’s been about three weeks since I brought in the new young border collie, Ice.

This is an update on the integration process.

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I’ve got a new puppy! In this life I talk about the process of integrating him into my home, the reality of high drive dogs and puppies, handler sensitivity and hardness, etc. We covered a lot of territory!

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