I also bet you most of them couldn't train a protection dog to save their soul. Some would have no idea where to start in training a dog for service dog needs. How about teaching a retriever to do a formal retrieve? Or to hunt? Can they reform an already aggressive dog (rather than 'preventing' aggression in the first place)? Can they teach a dog that is fearful of people to begin to trust them again?
You ask that I not try to create a divide here, but in fact what I'm trying to do is show homogeny between trainers who have different end goals. All of the above subsets of training must start with the same thing - a temperamentally sound dog that is willing and able to learn, and has the groundwork to communicate with a trainer in that process.
Here's the sequence of the dialog so far, just to clarify what my point is:
The claim is made, in many different ways, that corrections "shut down" a dog, lead to learned helplessness, and squash independent thinking. As opposed to mainly positive-based training.
I venture to point out, with many illustrations, that the training I do here, and which many others like me do, accomplishes quite the opposite - dogs that are confident where they weren't before, and steady, calm thinkers where they were impulsive and reactive previously.
There is some debate in another thread about what it is that goes on in herding training that makes it uniquely suited to the appropriate application of P+ training, and why I have to start introducing P+
before actual herding training begins.
This is when I object to the notion that the only people that could be considered qualified to modify behavior in dogs, are those who specifically are formally educated in the current body of research on animal behavior. I do, by the way, understand why this is an objection to CM - I also can't imagine that TV does the type of work he claims to do, any justice.
Kim says that stockdog trainers may be good at training stockdogs, but that doesn't qualify them for working with fundamental behavior problems. Those people have the luxury of shooting dogs when a behavioral problem crops up, rather than working through it.
I respond, not very clearly, that since a dog doesn't start training until around a year old, they'd rather not feed up and then shoot reams of dogs to find the one that's perfect from birth. Also, that I've seen very vividly demonstrated, how these trainers dealt extremely effectively with a variety of
existing fundamental behavioral issues ranging from aggression to shyness, to fear, to specific fears from thunderphobia to traveling to wire fence after getting shocked by the hotwire. Remember, these guys get their living training OTHER people's dogs and they spend a lot of time fixing the baggage these dogs come with first.
I'll tell you a few stories and you tell me whether there's no place for the fundamentals in working training. My late friend and trainer had something of a reputation for being able to take the dogs that no one else could do anything with, and give them a second chance. What I do now is something of an homage to his work, in fact - though he passed away long before I learned enough to do full credit to him.
He took in a young dog named Ben for training, for a friend. When he got Ben, I happened to be there the same day. I glanced in his kennel at the new dog and was struck to the heart by the tell-tale dead eyes of a severely abused dog. Steve walked up and shook his head a bit grimly.
"Someone's been
at that one," he said and his mouth set. He walked in and Ben retreated into the dog house, only his wide yellow eyes now visible. Steve crouched down and sat on the hard floor, said a couple words, and then was silent. He waved me on, and I went and got my own dog and worked for a while. After about an hour Steve joined me and we talked about what I was doing. I made arrangements to come back again in a few days.
When I came back, Steve was sitting in Ben's kennel again. Ben had his head sticking out of the kennel and was eying Steve with less cunning and more simple curiosity. Steve was smoking. There was a small drift of smoked-out butts all around him, plus a little pyramid of beer cans outside the door of the kennel.
"Camping out?" I asked, a bit ironically.
"Mmmm."
I went up to the house to say hello to Steve's wife. I laughed a little about Steve in the kennel. She rolled her eyes at me. "Maybe you're here we can go get some dinner. He takes all his meal breaks in that damn kennel."
And so it went for about two weeks. Now, I might add that Steve suffered from CLL, a form of leukemia that required his getting frequent chemo treatments. It had reached the stage where sitting still for any length of time was excruciating, because the blood vessels in his extremities were breaking down, much like what happens with hypertension or diabetes. He would, in fact, die within that year. His wife was very worried, under the sarcasm. But Steve was a stubborn man, and he was going to stay there until Ben chose to let him come in the kennel without freaking out.
It would have been stupid for him to try to train him without this prelude. What he was about to do was to train Ben to work in fields with no fences. He needed Ben's trust desperately. Previous trainers had used a variety of methods to make sure Ben didn't run off, from long lines, to chains attached to weights, to shock collars.
It took about two weeks, but at the end of it, Ben was not only trusting him, but me also, and eventually Ben ended up as my dog when Steve passed away (I changed his name, by the way, to avoid confusion with my old Ben). He was never a great sheepdog, he had too many scars to overcome, but he went on to become a highly useful goose control dog and beloved companion for one of the country's top goosedog trainers.
Story #2 - much shorter:
A couple months ago a friend wrote me saying she had booked a private lesson with Jack Knox. She was excited but nervous. Her rescue dog came with some serious issues about strange men - she was terrified of them. She knew Jack liked to work the dog seperate from the student, to see what issues the dog has that are distinct from the handler (LOL). She wanted to know whether Jack would be offended if she proposed skipping that part.
"Don't worry," I said. "I can't tell you how many times I've seen people walk up to Jack with the exact thing coming out of their mouth. 'I'll have to work my dog,' they say, 'She won't work for anyone else . . .' as Jack firmly takes away the leash and walks off with their dog."
I explained that Jack's a "fixer" and prefacing a session with "My dog has this problem and can't . . ." is like waving the red cape. You will be guaranteed a little behavior modification session before the dogs even see the sheep, no charge, gratis, thanks for coming, you win the doorprize.
Sure enough, her dog hurled herself to the ground and played road pizza the second the leash was transferred. Jack immediately sat on the ground and did his little routine, but all so quiet my friend could hardly hear it. Within a couple minutes, Jack had the little bitch fawning all over him and he threw the leash away and went for a walk. If she spooked, he said a word and she froze, and he immediately cooed her (he's Scottish - you wouldn't believe the range of sounds this man can make) and she wiggled her way back to him, tail flailing.
A few repeats of this and my friend said she was bawling like a baby. She'd been working with this dog for two years. Jack walked the little dog into the paddock and they started the lesson. My friend said she hardly remembered what they did in regards to the sheep - but since their lesson her dog has happily accepted strangers who don't do terribly scary things - my friend prompts them in what to do and provides the "talk".
Finally, a very short story. Brocken Robbie was a very famous dog overseas. He showed a lot of promise in his early training, and his owner was persuaded to send him off for "finishing" - though she honestly was well able to do it herself.
When he came back, he wasn't quite the same dog. He still was brilliant, but he'd lost something. And there was something else. Suddenly, he was terrified of thunderstorms. Now, electrical storms are fairly rare in the West of England, so it wasn't a huge problem. But it was bad enough that Robbie's owner was troubled. She was fairly sure that something had happened during a storm to create a bad association in sensitive Robbie.
So she set out to reverse it. For the rest of Robbie's life, she made sure something lovely and enjoyable would be happening when bad weather was expected. But she never quite erased the fear, and she learned something valuable - that it's easier to create a bad association than it is to undo it.
Most of us know this principle and exercise great caution in the first year and early training. This is a basic fundamental, one of many that working trainers have to understand, that apply to
every dog equally.