27/08/2025
🐾👍🏻❤️
I ‘control’ and teach my dog what the preferred choices are.
She is shown how good decisions get rewarded but she has been ‘controlled’ to train her how to make those decisions.
Those decisions certainly don’t come naturally to her
& they need reminding sometimes
In certain situations
I ‘control’ where she goes, what she does, what she is fed, who she socialises with amongst many others things!
Sometimes she has autonomy to make her own decisions…..in certain situations under certain circumstances
But there is an element of ‘control’ there…..behind the scenes….😉
As dogs also need to learn consequences of poor decision making too
Im a force free trainer
But not positive only
We definitely need to start ‘parenting’ our dogs
Its also not healthy for them to have no guidance or boundaries
Which is why some are ‘reactive’ and feral! 😉
😵 Control – the taboo word in dog training.
It’s one of those words that some trainers are afraid to even say, because the extreme FF faction of the dog training world see it as abusive. According to them, if I say I want my dog to be under control, I’m already a bad person.
But dogs are the result of centuries of selection, work, cooperation and partnership with humans. And still today, many breeds are used for the very jobs they were created for.
Those jobs need two things:
• strong natural instincts
• and a huge amount of control
Because instincts on their own don’t make a sheepdog, a gundog, or a protection dog.
A sheepdog doesn’t just naturally do the job right. It takes time, training, listening skills, mutual respect and loads of control. That means teaching the dog not to do what instinct screams at them to do, but to wait, to listen, and to work with us.
A gundog won’t just stay steady when a bird flushes right in front of them. That’s not instinct, that’s trained control.
A protection dog can’t go around biting everyone they think as a threat. Their protective instinct is shaped, trained, and kept under control until the handler asks for it.
I could keep going, but the point is: none of these breeds are left to “make choices” and figure it out on their own. They are bred for extremes in very specific traits, and without training and control, those same traits become a problem.
Yes, of course I use shaping, capturing, errorless learning and all the modern tools to train my dogs. But what I shape is still an element of control, at the end there is that “cue” or “command” (such a bed word 😮💨) to ask what I want them to do.
Even a pet collie needs this. Instincts don’t disappear just because the dog is living in a house. They need to be guided, redirected, and most of all kept under control.
Control isn’t about suppression. It’s about giving our dogs the skills to listen, to respond even with distractions, to make better choices because we’ve trained them how.
So maybe it’s time to stop treating “control” like a dirty word, we are causing a lot of misunderstanding in the general public that think that their dogs can do whatever they want as asking them to do otherwise is punishment and bad ownership.
Ps: in the picture is a happy and under control dog that enjoy life more than most dogs I know.
