r/DogTrainingDebate

had a private trainer for about two months with my 2 year old german shepherd mix. paid a good amount and honestly didn’t see much real progress. sessions felt rushed, the methods were inconsistent, and my dog still pulls hard and reacts to other dogs on walks. started feeling like i was wasting money.

decided to stop and switch. what made you finally leave a trainer that wasn’t working?

did you notice a clear difference once you switched to a more structured program?

A house around the block has 3 reactive dogs that bark when you past them. Is it okay to use those dogs to train yours by walking across that house twice? Dogs going crazy.

Take a dog that has been trained to the highest standard of its genetic predispositions. Say a world champion igp dog, a Belgian ring champion, a real world herding dog from the Scottish highlands. Anything in that vein. Hand that dog to a force-free person and tell them to train the dog to be neutral to a decoy, ignore sheep, etc. Whatever goes absolutely against that dog's previous training, training that has capitalized on the dogs genetic drives and talents. Now that's something I want to see. Show me how effective this ideology is that you can take an igp3 dog competing at the world's level and teach it to ignore a decoy without implementing any consequences or punishment or tools and that includes harnesses leashes collars Etc.

A lot of people will clutch their pearls but when working dogs such as search and rescue dogs and military dogs started being a thing, the entire point of having the dog was to send the dog into areas that were too dangerous for humans to go to. The dog is expendable, humans are not. This is, incidentally, why police dogs exist. So that the dog can be deployed into a dangerous situation that is too hot for a human officer to risk their life.

So in light of this discussion about the service dog dying of heat exhaustion at disney, what's our position on this now? Is the dog just a tool, just a piece of "medical equipment" then why should we object to a dog dying while on the job? That's the dog's job, if it has to die doing it, well I guess that's just collateral damage. Or do we now prioritize the life and health of the dog over the job that it's doing? Should we refrain from deploying search and rescue dogs into dangerous Rubble if there is the slightest chance they get injured or killed? Or are we going to accept that risk as a part of having an animal doing that kind of work?