I love you – but I don’t trust you. Trust is paramount – if you can’t trust your dog, you might as well rehome it. People really believe their dog trusts them – but they have never given a reason for the dog to trust. If your dog is reactive – it doesn’t trust some part of you.
If a husband believes his wife is having an affair, respect is out the window. It’s not possible to respect that which you don’t trust. He’ll be checking her phone, facebook, likely following her around. Might try to set up play dates with people he trusts, he’ll restrict her movements. What happens to his confidence? Out the window. You cannot respect or be confident in that which you don’t trust. You might as well end the relationship.
Now lets just say the wife has done nothing wrong, it’s all in the husbands head because he’s insecure over the relationship. She would have every right to be upset, might even get a little reactive or aggressive with him.
In human terms, the relationship is toxic.
The number one thing I hear from dog owners today? I don’t trust my dog. If you don’t trust your dog, then you cannot respect it. You won’t let it be a dog, won’t let it act like a dog, the dog will never see a dog park – the dog will never be respected as the species that it is. And you will never be confident in that relationship. Why is this happening? Because nobody has ever shown you that your dog is capable – they tell you your dog is a liability. Something to be drugged, treat trained, shocked into submission. The list goes on.
Humans can make the choice to leave a toxic relationship. The dog is stuck with you. Chew on that for a while. Can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard trainers say “you don’t need to trust the dog, the dog needs to trust you”. It doesn’t work that way. You have zero reason to follow that which you don’t trust – the dog is no different.
Fear is lack of trust. You don’t terminate fear – it’s building trust that crushes fear. If you’re out and about with someone you trust completely – you have no reason to be afraid. What about the dog?
Training today is mainly based on quadrants – a system that doesn’t care about the dogs brain or thought process. It expects you as a dog owner to “operantly condition” everything – to train everything. It’s a system that dictates that the poor dog can’t possibly learn without reward and punishment. Now owners are being told that you can’t possibly fix the dog without professional help. This is utter nonsense. And we wonder why owners get defeated? The system has failed, it’s crashed. The horse is down, put a bullet in it.
Today, people are being told to fix things with tools – food, clickers, collars, control and management etc.
Take a step back and understand something. The dog isn’t broken, your relationship with your dog is – and you can’t train that. This is why people spend months and years and never achieve real success. Would you hire a trainer to fix a marriage? Would you go to an animal behaviorist to fix your marriage? No, that would be silly.
If you can’t do it yourself – find someone to show you that your dog is capable – that you can trust your dog. That’s my job, and I take my job very seriously. Dogs can change in hours if the human would step out of the way and let the dog learn the way it’s supposed to – through social cognition. The dog is the ONLY animal on the planet that doesn’t get to learn through social cognition – there is always a “human threshold” standing in the way, blocking the dog – listen to me or I’ll punish you in some way. Think about that long and hard.
Dare to be different. Dare to think different. Be the change you want in your dog.