r/DogTrainingCrucible

A lot of LIMA or force free leaning trainers seem to blame the owners for choosing balanced training methods. Is this fair or reasonable? Let's look at a couple of common examples.

A family has a 6 month old doodle puppy - cute as a button and sweet as could be. They want to get some training in and call a FF trainer. Trainer shows up with a bag of treats, teaching puppy sit and down and place. Throws in fetch for the kids and everybody is happy.

The family had a great experience They will likely use FF trainers in the future.

How about another example, though. Young gal just out of college gets her first puppy. She chooses a Rottweiler because she had one as a kid. She does her research and gets the pup from a well-established breeder with a great reputation and some titles.

When this puppy is 6 months old, he starts up with some very frightening reactive behavior. He is barking and lunging at people on walks. He looks very aggressive. The owner is worried he will bite someone, and she is having a hard time even controlling him.

What happens now? Maybe she heads to reddit reactive dogs first thing and spends 3 hours reading some really devastating stories. She reads about several dogs just in the last few days who were euthanized for reactive behavior. She's starting to feel a little panicky.

Next day she gets a FF trainer out, but unfortunately this trainer is totally unskilled. The trainer has no education, just basically watched a bunch of Zak George videos and decided to hang out her shingle. She tells this worried dog owner that her dog is a "genetic mess" and that the behavior is "genetic aggression." She recommends getting some meds for the dog, and then says it might be "years or never" before the behavior is resolved.

She never gets within 10 feet of the pup.

Now what? Our owner loves her dog, and is not willing to give up on him. She gets on the phone and calls a whole bunch of local trainers.

Finally, one woman says, "Your puppy sounds like a normal, adolescent Rottie. I can get that behavior resolved for you in 6-8 weeks. I'll throw in a rock solid off-leash recall, and in 2 months you'll be letting your dog run free in the woods without a care in the world,"

There is just no world in which what this owner understood to be the FF option is better.

It's not the owner's fault. If you are all over reddit blaming owners for choosing balanced trainers who actually helped their dogs, maybe have a little think about whose fault it really is that these owners can't get reliable help from the FF trainers in their communities.

The problem is not loving owners trying to help their dogs in the best way they can find.

The real problem is that so many FF trainers are taking on cases they just don't have the skills to resolve. These trainers are causing a lot of people to believe FF is ineffective, and skilled FF trainers are being hurt by association.

If one wants to call themselves a dog trainer, here's the #1 rule: You have to be able to train the damn dog.

Don't make excuses. Don't blame genetics. Don't recommend meds. Don't say it'll take a year.

If you are not confident that you can train the dog, you need to refer out until you gain more experience Stop blaming the owners who just want what's best for their dog.

Separation anxiety (SA) or the more common isolation distress (ID) can be one of the most challenging behavioral disorders to train and resolve. It also has one of the biggest impacts on owners, often leading to isolation, frustration, and guilt.

SA/ID is one of the leading reasons for failed adoptions as well as owner surrender, especially in these post-pandemic years. One study found that up to 92% of recently adopted shelter dogs showed separation-related behavioral issues.

As a trainer, how do you approach both diagnosing and training for SA/ID? How do you distinguish separation frustration or from genuine panic? What timeline do you attempt for resolution?

As an owner: how have you handled separation anxiety? How were you personally impacted and how long did it take to resolve?

What is a reasonable amount of time to expect an owner to pay for professional training? At $200 an hour once per week, the owner would be looking at 5K for 6 months of training.

Is this reasonable? If an owner comes in with a reactive dog and is told it may take 6 months to a year, or longer, to train the dog (5-10K), might the owner just give up and drop that dog at the shelter?

We can look at what we believe are "ideal" training methods, I guess, but if those methods end up with the dog being dropped at the shelter, that's not doing anybody any good, is it?

Do trainers have an obligation to try to get resolution (or at least significant improvement) in the presenting complaint within around 6-8 weeks?

Counter-conditioning for a behavior deals with changing emotions, which presumes the dog is in a negative emotional state (like fear/anxiety).

But what about behaviors stemming from over-arousal or aggression? Do you use counter-conditioning for that as well or something else? How can you tell if you are actually changing the underlying emotions VS simply reinforcing alternative/incompatible behaviors?