Two of the dumbest concepts in dog training have roots in the same thing – ignorance. Here’s how it works.
You don’t know how to control a behavior problem. Meaning you are incapable of working on a specific behavior and eliminating it or putting it ‘on cue’.
Your knee-jerk solution becomes 1) Exercise and 2) Redirection/teach an alternate behavior.
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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.
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“Positive” ideologues often attempt to masquerade as moral people by quoting the Hippocratic oath – incompletely. They assert that they must first, “do no harm”. The problem is that they do not actually understand what harm really means. That is because their beliefs are not rooted in logic.
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While practical experience and analysis are the best teachers, they do not automatically teach a good understanding of fundamental principles. When trainers are rule-driven or limit their study to accepted applications they can miss important aspects of any training topic. This is a general scent project that will teach you well beyond anything you’re going to get from any single tradition of scent work.
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When I decided to offer behavior services I had already trained two dogs as urban animal control dogs. If you are interested in that story, go to my blog and put ‘Megan’ in the top search box. My dogs were as good in the field as the city’s police K9’s and in some ways better. However, I have a great deal of respect for kn
owledge and learning and decided to delve into the world of science. I called the University of Washington bookstore to see if they had Conditioned Reflexes by Pavlov. (The correct translation of the original Russian title is ‘Conditional Reflexes’. That will make a difference in this conversation, later. )
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