What is Positive Dog Training

dog training
force free dog training
I am going to just come out and say it, “all positive dog training” is the biggest lie in the history of dog training and is responsible for more dogs being destroyed than any invention made. It has been concocted by a bunch of university snowflakes who had no real world experience. They proposed a theory that was then “peer reviewed” by their friends and followers and was made into popular lore. And has become virtual law.
Yes, I have studied and applied “all positive” methods and modified it to my own methods because I found what ACTUALLY worked in the real world with real poorly behaved dogs.
Dog training used to be really simple. You enforce a strict regiment to your dog, make sure your dog understands the rules of the house and what was acceptable and what was not. You teach the dog when it misbehaves what it was doing wrong and what it should be doing. Done.Fixed
Yes, it had faults. A lot of people power tripped and use a heavy handed approach, including hurting and threatening the dog. But frankly, you get idiots in any industry.
Since the prevalence of all positive dog training, the only method owners know is to use treats for dog training.
Get a dog to stop jumping on you? Just turn your back, cry like a victim until the dog stops, then reward it with a treat. Seriously? WTF? If your 3 year old did that to you, would you apply this method?
If your dog lunges at another dog, give it a treat to “positively condition” it so it will like dogs in the future. Let me ask you this: if your 3 yr old hurled abuse at other people in public, would you tell her “honey, please stop being abusive in public and I will give you a lolly?”. Most reasonable people would say no. THEN WHY WOULD YOU DO IT TO YOUR DOG?!
And despite these methods not working, they keep trying until they find the rare dog that it does work on… They then label the dogs THAT THEY FAILED, “untrainable”. Instead of acknowledging that they failed, they blame the dog. These dogs are then recommended for euthanasia… By the millions every year.
 
 

Why Don't Force Free or positive dog only training mention obedience

  • It can be agreed upon that force free trainers do not believe it is ethical to train dog’s in obedience and it is also scientifically accurate that the “force free” training does not employ techniques to teach the dog a consequence for “not obeying”.
  • Trainers are being discriminated against that are educated in the same principles of positive reinforcement based training, but also have additional education to ethically and safely train obedience.
  • In some cased “force free” trainers use more “force” than ethical dog trainers, because they did not study the proper use of training tools and often choose more aversive options based simply on the look or name of the tool.

Obedience – compliance with an order, request, or law or submission to another’s authority.  Synonyms: compliance, conformity, submission, subordination

So called force free positive only

force free dog training

Force Free and purely positive is false advertising

Nobody (reasonable folks anyhow) wants to hurt their dog. So, typically, when a trainer says they do not use force and never do anything bad or negative to the dog, it sounds good. It is what people like and want to hear. I seriously applaud the notion of not using force and not using negative or (what scientists call) “aversive” events in training. On the other hand, there are both pleasant as well as aversive events in the world and we learn from both whether we like it or not. Thus, in training my own dogs, I try to achieve a balance. I strongly emphasize the use of the good stuff and use the aversive stuff in a more targeted way to decrease specific undesirable behaviors because science shows it to be the most effective way to do so. I should note that when I say, “science shows“, I am referring to a whole body of literature and not just a few cherry-picked studies..