I have never liked the word ‘balance’ when dog trainers attempt to justify what it is they do with dogs. I have never needed a descriptor to validate what I do. I came up from the ranks of doers, not labels. Dog training is a thing you do with a dog that requires more than adherence to some misguided dogma that a trainer clings to.
The movement to call oneself a ‘balanced’ trainer started years ago when the purely positive, or ‘positive only’ folks decided to cut themselves off from reality and segregate themselves from other trainers who use both positive and negative reinforcement and punishment in their training; otherwise known as Skinner’s 4 quadrants.
I am a dog trainer. I train dogs to do or not do things. I do not balance on a tightrope, and the mental gymnastics actually required to do this job successfully is more akin to boxing or playing chess. Each in equal measure.
When you work with dogs, the risk of injury is exponential. Dogs bite. They scratch, they jump, they pummel you with their roughhousing. Statistically, it’s not a matter of if you get bitten, but when. Only the trainer gets to determine how often they permit that to occur. The more you know, the less you bleed. Getting bitten isn’t the badge of honor many trainers think it is.
The physical demands alone require a level of fitness that wanes with repetitive use injuries, and age. Young and fit, we are all at the top of our game. Older and not so fit, we rely on years of experience to get us through the hard parts.
A successful dog trainer and a boxer have a lot in common. Their similarities include being able to land more blows than they receive. Sure, you’re gonna get hit, but your skill level determines how often and how hard. Dog trainers shouldn’t be landing blows, but they should have developed enough skill to avoid them and use better defensive strategies which need to include how not to get bitten in the first place.
Dog trainers have a lot in common with chess masters as well. Dog training requires strategic thinking, problem solving skills, and the ability to read and anticipate your opponent’s moves, often several steps in advance. The mental endurance necessary to abandon a strategy and adapt as needed is underscored by that ability to know your opponent and be able to read the subtle changes in behavior that indicate action.
The ability to make decisions about a dog’s training and potential future is an asset developed over years of practicing and refining sufficient skill for that to even be possible.
Although the dog you are training isn’t your opponent, the dog might consider you an opponent. You have to have created a sufficient strategy to protect yourself and the dog you are working with.
Dog training isn’t balance, as much as it is strategy. Harmony, even, moving seamlessly from one action to another, and not relying on a device or a belief that there is only one way to train a dog.
I am not a ‘balanced trainer’. I am a strategist. I follow a method that allows for revision to accommodate every dog I train. A method is material that is selected, organized, and presented using experience, and provides a sense of order to thoughts and behavior. It is a systematic plan of action, to approach and accomplish a specific goal. That doesn’t mean that it is rigid and unbending. It is simply a framework to follow which enables the user to reach an ultimate, repeatable conclusion.
The dog tells me how I should proceed. Although the method itself is unchanged, the application differs with every dog. We are still ending up in the same place, and we still step on every rung of the ladder, but the 4 month old puppy will require a different level of attention than would the 7 year old, fearful street dog scraped off the streets of Houston and shipped to some rescue in Maryland.
Temperance, patience, diligence. Practice. Experience.
Only time can develop the skill to know when to push through, when to push back, when to push at all. How to push. These are the things that matter. The malleability of the method is measured in its ability to adapt to every temperament and behavior and accommodate those changes while remaining non-reliant on tools or static philosophies. Understanding dogs enables the trainer to not have to rely on specific tools, or fail dogs based on outdated and unproven reliance on weak science.
Evidence based training relies on the primary tenets of the validity of the training (does it work?), sufficiency (can it complete the task?), authenticity (can it be/has it been reproduced by others?), and currency (a generally accepted practice). The evidence lies with the dogs. They are our best teachers.
Training is still training, but it requires strategy, not some arbitrary adherence to an elitist interpretation of ‘balance’ which has more to do with polarizing and political alignment to a certain camp of dogmatic beliefs.
We need to do better.
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