A Hatchet Job in the Name of Advocating for Your Dog
Oh, for heaven’s sake.
Of all sources, I didn’t expect this sort of hatchet job from “The Dog’s Champion” about the importance of advocating for your dog and their needs, but here we go.
A Lost Opportunity for Unity
My curiosity was piqued by the title, honestly, thinking that it would come from the AKC’s history of championing purebred dogs, performance events and the lofty expectation of educating prospective dog owners. I was looking for them creating a sort of unity between the companion dog owners and helping them navigate an increasingly difficult-to-understand world of dog ownership, care and management.
Permissive Nonsense Disguised as Advocacy
But no. What we have instead is a cluster of permissive BS that doesn’t address advocating for your dog at all, but pandering to an increasingly misled following that seems to think anti-social dog behavior should be acceptable.
What Real Advocacy Looks Like
Instead of creating the next generation of K9 Karen owners, how about we start directing our collective might to encourage people what to look for in a service provider that can actually help. We’ll get to that part in a minute…
Comfort vs. Control: The Reality of Dog Behavior
The first paragraph starts out fine. I agree with the lot of it, until we get to the part about the dog’s comfort taking precedence. The dog’s comfort is important, but our collective goal should be how to teach the dog to control it’s own emotional state. That’s our job as owners and as service providers to a public that is increasingly blind to what makes a dog a dog and not a furry human.
Training is Not Just About Management
If a person’s dog is inclined to be uncomfortable in certain situations, the owner should consider finding a trainer to help mitigate that behavior. Hell, I do it for a living. As a matter of fact, I can even do it online. Since before the pandemic, I have offered virtual coaching and online training for dogs that has yielded many satisfied owners who had previously not achieved success through other means. Not just dogs who went on to successful Obedience Competition careers, but dogs owned by people that are frustrated by aggressive, submissive, fearful or ‘reactive’ behavior.
It is not unusual for me to be the last in a line of successive trainers from both extremes of the dog training perspective. That’s my specialty these days. Taking damaged dogs and making them whole.
The Misguided Myth of Socialization
If an owner persists in placing their dog in situations that create such a state of arousal that the dog is no longer capable of rational thought, that’s not only a training issue, that’s a management issue. I know that people really struggle with the concept of ‘socialization’, but what they’re doing and what they have been told to do ain’t it. Constantly traipsing out to your dog’s biggest concern isn’t socialization, no matter how hard your button-pushing or treat slinging ‘trainer’ tells you it is.
The basic tenet of positive reinforcement is to teach the dog a behavior incompatible with fear, anxiety, aggression, whatever. I agree with that, but the lesson cannot be maintained in front of a distraction that the dog finds too compelling. Performance in the face of competing interests isn’t a ‘one-and-done’ proposition. It requires a lot of effort.
It also requires that you measure progress in ways the dog understands, and begin to proof behaviors under more compelling circumstances. There becomes a right and a wrong. If we continue to permit escape and avoidant behavior without consequence, it acts as an endorsement for the very behavior the owner might be trying to resolve. The notion that dogs should be happy about everything is absolute nonsense. Are you happy going for your annual mammogram? Proctology exam? Do you wake up singing on the day of your tax audit? No?
Didn’t think so.
Once you get to the point where the dog understands the behavior, you still aren’t throwing it to the wolves philosophically, you work at a periphery to the problem before ever expecting the dog to be able to accommodate the problem directly. That’s just common sense.
Obedience and Behavior Are Linked
The other side of that coin is the suggestion that the dog should never be expected to overcome difficulty, which I find equally offensive. Have we really lost sight of how dog training is used to control the outcomes of behavior? Must we still insist on this arbitrary divide between obedience and behavior as separate entities where one is somehow been made incompatible to the other?
How had dogs learned to manage before the internet and all the animal ‘rights’ advocates who prefer dogs be treated like Fabergé Eggs and carried around as personality substitutes for people that have never managed a durable social relationship with another human being in their lives?
Basic Responsibility: Where Does the Real Fault Lie?
If “Wesley” was anxious around other dogs, and had an eye infection to boot, why was he even in an environment with other dogs? Why didn’t the ‘trainer’ send her home until the infection was cleared? Why didn’t the vet, assuming veterinary care had been sought, warn Wesley’s owner to stay TF home with her dog that may or may not have had a commutable pathogen known as conjunctivitis. Highly contagious, but apparently not a big deal to these savants.
Too afraid to tell the trainer the owner wanted to ‘sit this exercise out’?
That’s nowhere near the biggest problem.
Personal Space and the Right to Say No
Ms. “He’s not friendly” needs to bone up on her RBF. I have had some pretty dangerous encounters while training out in public. I opt to doff any remote implication that as a woman I need to sit down when it comes to my son or my animals. No means NO. If I tell you to not approach, I will intervene if you try. More people ought to understand that they own the ground they walk upon. This is 2025. I was built for confrontation. I will choose violence.
And I don’t start out that way. A simple, “I’m sorry, (s)he is in training right now to help her overcome her fear/anxiety/defensive behavior/ in public. Maybe next time”, has worked for me forever. The vast majority of times I have either used that line myself, or instructed my owners to use it, it has worked. On the off chance it may not, be prepared. Block or walk. That simple.
Seeking Help and the Power of Training
If a dog is so bad that it can only be walked under the cover of darkness, then you need professional help. I can even do it from here, if you can’t find competent help near you. If I know where you live, it’s likely that I can find someone that actually has a clue. Having been around as long as I have affords a lot more than a bad attitude and an axe to grind. I know a thing or two, and I know a lot of folks that can get the job done.
A Deluded Perspective on Training and Dog Welfare
The author of the article I posted upthread wallows in the weeds of her own self-importance before finally arriving at the conclusion that her readers should “put your dog’s welfare above your own embarrassment.”
Training is Empowerment
Oh honey. Be proud that you are taking steps to not only make your dog’s life better, but your own! Dog training is empowering! I cannot enumerate the folks who have come through my doors wanting to improve their dogs’ behavior and walk out a little taller, a little more self-assured because of what the experience had done for them.
Once they abandoned the notion that their dog’s fate as a gibbering mess wasn’t a permanent condition as they had been led to believe by every animal right social justice warrior they ever encountered, they rose to the occasion, set the disapproving ‘tut tuts’ aside and got down to the business of training.
Tolerance is a Product of Successful Training
Advocating for your dog does include understanding there are characteristics that may be incompatible with social behavior. I have 3 social butterflies and one really aloof, borderline antisocial dog whose use for humans is zero unless they are capable of taking him to birds, letting him hunt and do things hundreds of years of genetic programming have endowed him with.
Know what they all have in common? They are trained. They are obedient. They all demonstrate that one extraordinary quality of tolerance. Because they were taught there are certain inevitabilities in life and to accept them as they come. Veterinary exams, grooming, and yes, the occasional approach by some bumbling human that was deluded into thinking the presence of dogs suggest a circus attraction for his or her children to gawk, or some form of oddity to be fondled and molested.
Aaaaaand no. What one thing my dogs do possess, and I include my student’s dogs in that statement, is the ability to tolerate the approach and inappropriate social interaction of incomprehensibly senseless humans without repercussions, because they have all been taught how to act. It’s either defense or offense, there is no in-between.
Extolling the virtues of a failed training ‘system’ that deliberately leaves out most of the training paradigm, or relies exclusively on management, while hand-wringing about the dog in questions’ pervasive inability to cope with the everyday stresses of living in a world with things in it, is such a bad look. A really really bad look.
And then there it is- the pièce de résistance. For me, anyway. This writer gets to swing her mallet with how to choose a dog trainer, couched in the typical tropes this trade has been drowning in for a couple of decades now.
I would think the persons I stood arm-in-arm with just a few short weeks ago, drafting responses to the proposed legislation in New Jersey governing dog trainers and training, would be more selective about who they choose as bedfellows. And here I find that you’ve actually invited them.
I understand your need to pander to your base, which is now largely made up of companion animal owners who may or may not have acquired dogs of questionable parentage that now outnumber your registry of purebred dogs from ‘preservation’ breeders. The commoner with their ‘All American’ rando-bred infidels have swollen the numbers for entries at performance events like rally, agility, and other soft sports where expectations are increasing lowered, and everybody can play. But that doesn’t mean you get to play both sides of the fence.
Pick a side. The incongruence of this act tells me a lot about who you are.
Shame on you.
