When you look at your dog, what do you see? An intelligent animal capable of thought and reason? Or a brainless automaton that needs to be “operantly conditioned” or “trained” to fit into every aspect of your life?
I don’t know if you realize it – but there is a war going on in dog training today. Positive reinforcement, purely positive, do no harm etc – they are all fighting amongst each other to see who can be more positive. And then they end up warring with balanced trainers. There is a problem here, dogs and their owners are paying the price.
The system of dog training that they are actually working under is actually all punishment based. They don’t look at the dog as an intelligent sentient creature – but only as something that needs to be trained, conditioned for everything – and you don’t need the brain to do it. This is the problem today – remove the dogs brain – and that is the biggest punishment and the most abusive thing you can possibly do to a living, thinking creature.
Imagine raising a child under the ideology that it can only accept or deny your choice – and be rewarded or punished based on that? We would call that abuse. But the dog… Yeah, what about the dog?
Every animal species on the planet raises their young from birth to become the species that it is. The only animal that isn’t getting that benefit is the dog. Dogs are taken away too young before the mom has a chance to finish her job and that included potty training. Now it’s left up to a human – that can’t teach a dog how to be a dog – to housebreak the puppy and it fails – so often. Dare to ask why?
Dogs co-evolved with us, they pushed our evolution. Humans started domesticating dogs some 30,000 years ago back in a time when we were literally prey animals. We didn’t have firearms or electricity, and there were wild animals that would kill and eat us – we were prey animals. Enter the dog – our tools. Dogs became our protectors. If not for the dog protecting livestock – would we ever have been able to domesticate livestock. Dogs were bred to hunt for us, to retrieve for us – the list is long. Every dog was bred for something but today, far too many dogs are living life as lumps on the couch with no purpose in life?
One would think they know us by now – and let me tell you – they know us inside and out. Your dog knows you better than you know you, but yet, we can’t seem to reciprocate. Training has literally taken the dog out of the animal kingdom, has redefined the dog into something it’s not – and why? Because the system that you’re training under – the quadrants of dog training – were built broken. You can read up on the history of what we have the nerve to call dog training here.
All you really are to a dog is a catalogue of smells and a bag of emotions. The dogs nose is so sensitive, they can smell changes in you. Did your dog get weird when you got pregnant? Your smell changed. Dogs have detected cancers in humans and are actually being trained in the UK to detect cancers. Dogs have detected impending heart attacks and strokes in humans. Dogs are the most honest animals on the face of the planet – you cannot lie to them, you cannot hide your emotions from them – they know you better than you know yourself.
But yet, we take the brain away and call it training? We need to do better.
If you want to understand the dog – go take a long hard look in the mirror at the animal staring back at you – and realize that your dog is your mirror. They are merely a reflection of you. Change the reflection, change the dog. That’s what B.F Skinner was getting at, you are an animal and share many behaviours with all animals. He proved that in a lab.