Caution: Minor preaching at the end. (My father was a Methodist minister and theologian. Sometimes I can’t help letting in some of that stuff.)

If I fail to do my job a dog could die. That has been my life since 1977. If I fail to catch a dog loose on the freeway, it could die. If I fail to get a stuck dog out of a drainage culvert when it’s raining and the water is rising, the dog could die. If I fail to teach a dog not to blast out the front door, a dog could die. If I fail to teach a reliable recall, a dog could die.

I have listed a few obvious fail-safe events that are obviously serious. However, from the beginning of working in shelters I started seeing the bigger picture. It’s not just about “serious” behavior problems as imagined by short-sighted people. A dog that pulls the laundry off the clothes-line one-too-many times may find an ‘accidentally’ open side-gate. A dog that knocks down a child, leading to a concussion and an ER visit may end up in limbo and leave the family. A potentially fatal behavior may not seem ‘serious’. ANY behavior that leads to the dog going to a shelter or being sold on Craig’s list is potentially fatal. Insulting dog owners for not being able to live with insanity doesn’t fix anything. Learning how to satisfy their desires for a good dog is the answer.

So, my rule of thumb isn’t about preventing death, it’s about creating a repertoire that preserves life. I assume that both behavioral polarities must be addressed – creating necessary behaviors and creating necessary inhibitions. Of the two, the overwhelmingly more important is stopping and inhibiting unacceptable behavior. If the dog is alive and temporarily scared spitless, you can take a lifetime to undo the horrible, traumatic, devastating BUT NOT FATAL side-effects of punishment. If the dog is dead, you can’t train it any more.

According to many behavior experts, the primary cause of death to companion animals is behavioral, not medical. They do things that people can’t live with. Stop the behavior, save a life. Ignore the behavior or take too long to fix it and you might as well schedule an appointment for euthanasia – which is not always “eu” – Greek for good. (To quote my first executive shelter director, sometimes it’s just killing. You can’t know that in advance. )

The correct way to save them is to use whatever behavioral effect you can, in any order, concurrency or exclusivity. I have fixed un-houstrainable dogs with exclusively positive methods. I have fixed vicious dogs with a single bonk. Those represent a tiny slice of what I do. In almost all cases the ‘fix’ is a combination of positive and negative in a recipe designed for that dog and that owner.

My question is for anyone who thinks their positive-only or negative-only solution is at all functional. If you are ‘all positive’ you have just told me your sphere of ignorance and what you can’t do. If you are all negative (I’ve never met that person, but if he/she exists, I will include that category) you have just told me your sphere of ignorance and what you can’t do.

If you wish to offer effective training to insure and preserve life, it makes sense to know as much or more than the ‘all positive’ people AND as much or more as the ‘all negative’ people and be able to know when either, both or some of each is the right fix for the dog. Meaning if you are truly balanced, you should know more about positive reinforcement than ‘all positive’ trainers. For the all positive people, you need to know a great deal more about aversive control than memorized hearsay. Get thee to a shelter and watch how animals are handled roughly and 20 minutes later completely unidentifiable as having been “abused” by a dog catcher. Guess what? You can’t pick them out of a line-up. You’ll likely ID the wussie-dogs every time. The ones that were babied their whole lives and were actually brought to the shelter by their owners vs. a dog that fought violently on a control stick. You have to address the dog in front of you without resorting to templates.