27/08/2025
Your Dog Is Not Broken
Published by Robert Hynes .
EVER WONDER WHERE DOG TRAINING CAME FROM AS WE KNOW IT TODAY.
This brilliant artical tells it all. The cruelty of the spiked collar, still used today.
Robert and I work on and study phycology. How the brain works in dogs. We are not interested or do we punish dogs with force or fear. We don't throw treats around like confetti to change a behaviour.
A couple of weeks ago in my home town Facebook group a person asked for a recommendation for a dog trainer. Many kind people recommended me and I thanked them .
I noticed that two other recommendations where for trainers that will use punishment and treats to train a dog. They start off by using treats and if that doesn't work they will turn to punishment, shock collars, spiked collars etc.
I said in the post be careful who you ask to train your dog. They came at me and got very personal. Funnily enough, not the two that were recommended (I never named them)
but their supporters.
I will stand against punishing dogs, come at me all you want.
But please read below first.
A Toast To Most: Konrad Most. Mary Burch. Evil You Say?
by robert · Published 25 August 2025 · Updated 25 August 2025
This is the most important blog you will ever read. But please, do read it.
What is Applied Behavior Analysis? And more importantly – where did it come from? Now we can explain it to you. What Zak George calls “Scientific Consensus” IS Dog Training – and that IS Applied Behavior Analysis – ABA. But ABA didn’t stay in dog training – now it’s used in human psychology – targetting mainly Autistic children.
Applied Behaviour Analysis is a creation of the American College of Veterinary Behaviorists that started around 1990. 35 years ago. Nobody questioned it – you will hear them say “our science” – yep – Scientific Consensus and it’s all nonsense.
AI definition – In Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA), reinforcement (reward) increases a desired behavior, while punishment decreases an undesirable one by applying a consequence. Positive reinforcement adds a desirable stimulus to increase a behavior (e.g., giving a cookie for good behavior), whereas positive punishment adds an aversive stimulus to decrease a behavior (e.g., time-out for calling out). ABA prioritizes reinforcement to build positive behaviors and create supportive learning environments, often avoiding punishment as a last resort or using negative punishment (removal of something desirable) instead.
Mary Burch – one of the 100 elite graduates of the American College of Veterinary Behaviorists – laid it out beautifully. It’s all solely and purely based on Konrad Most’s book Training Dogs – written in 1910 – and the real Quadrants Of Dog Training. Primary and Secondary Induments and Compulsive Inducements – the cake and stick – reward and punishment. Konrad Most is the father of Schutzhund – or what you know today as IGP. Robert Cabral and other IGP is pushing that system of ABA based on Konrad Most – Training Dogs. Zak George and Dr. Lisa Radosta is pushing same.
Notice how B.F Skinner is mentioned – but hey – they brushed the real Science of Behaviour – real Psychology aside. There is zero psychology to Konrad – he laid out rules for beating the dog into submission using that Schutzhund stick. Lets get into the Letter from Mary Burch – edited by Jon S. Bailey. Now watch Dr. Lisa Radosta or Dr Melanie Uhde – it’ll all make sense. When you apply “Applied Behaviour Analysis” – you are employing dog training protocols from a book that is 115 years old.
The original article is here – but I typed it out to make it easier to read.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1286234/
A Toast To Most: Konrad Most.
A 1910 Pioneer In Animal Training. Written by Mary Burch and edited by Jon S. Bailey.
Shortly after the turn of the century, and 28 years before the publication of The Behaviour Of Organisms (Skinner, 1938), an obscure dog trainer in Germany was busy discovering the basic principles of behaviour and describing their application in training service dogs. Colonel Konrad Most, a police commissioner at the Royal Prussian Police Headquarters, antipated many of Skinner’s key concepts in the book Training Dogs (Most,1910/1954). A pioneer in animal training, Most showed an understanding of the key elements of operant conditioning including Primary and Secondary Reinforcement, extinction, shaping, fading, chaining, and negative conditioning (punishment).
Most began training service dogs in 1906 while police commissioner in Saarbrucken. Training Dogs (Most, 1910/1954) continues to be recognized as an authoritative source for canine training throughout Europe. Although many of the terms Most used were different from those outlined in “The behaviour of organisms”, the concepts and rules described are the same. Most demonstrated a clear understanding of the rules of behaviour change, giving sound advice to trainers regarding reinforcement, punishment, and providing for generalization.
Most described reinforcement (“inducement,” p.27) as that “aggreable experience” that is provided when the dog has performed a correct behaviour. Inducements were to be used in trainingn to follow a correct behaviour immediately, as a regular consequence. In teaching a new skill, Most was aware that shaping was critical: the “slightest progress toward the desired behaviour should be reinforce, not only with terms like “good boy” but with that of fondling…” (p.34). Most made the same distinction as Skinner between primary and secondary reinforcement. For Most, food and fondling were “Primary Inducements” (p.27). Secondary reinforcers (e.g verbal praise and soft tones) were referred to as “secondary inducements”. According to Most, an effective trainer will realize that animals will not perform consistently with secondary inducements alone; from time to time, the trainer must resort to primary inducements. Most described as the ultimate aim of training the ability to control working dogs by auditory and visual signals (e.g., hald signals) that were “the lightest possible stimulus,” thus demonstrating an understanding of the concept of fading. (p.43).
Most was even aware of the problem of extinction. In practical settings such as police work, dogs are required to perform many tasks for which there are infrequence reinforcers. Dogs searching the countryside for human victims lose interest in their work if they search many times and find no one. Most recommended that reinforcers be “planted” if needed to avoid extinction. (p.42). Further, in order to ensure that dogs would not refuse to perform tasks in the real world, Most advocated providing a variety of “distractionary stimuli” (p.24) during training, indicating an awareness of problems of stimulus control.
Punishment was referred to by Most as “compulsions” (p.26) and was described as “primary compulsive inducements” (e.g., jerks on the choke collar) or “secondary compulsive inducements” (e.g. intimidating sounds such as the “BAH!” sound Most used to indicate a dog was not performing correctly). (p.26). Trainers were warned about the importance o timing when delivering punishment: “If the sense-stimuli in question are separate in time and space from the disagreeable experience or “punishment”, it will prove impossible to establish the required association” (p.29).
Because Most’s text was, and still is, little known outside Europe (it translated into English in 1954), it is unlikely that Skinner was influenced by this publication. Nonetheless, it is important to recognize that, historically, Skinner was not alone in his views about the relationship between consequences and behaviour. Most’s work is significant because he was one of the first behaviourists to articulate some distinctions regarding training procedures and to put them in practice on a large scale, applied, and functional context. Whereas Most was content to apply his method in dog training, Skinner’s contribution was in explaining human behaviour and in setting the stage for the field of applied behaviour analysis as we know it.
You can download the pdf of Konrad Most – Training Dogs here:
https://yourdogisnotbroken.org/books/konradmosttrainingdogs.pdf
Audio book is here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaqvKdcIuGQ
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