Training School for Dogs

22/06/2026

Death before discomfort.

That appears to be the position being taken here by the New Zealand Veterinary Association.

If a dog has serious predatory behaviour towards wildlife, livestock, or native species, the NZVA’s position effectively rules out the use of aversive-based training methods designed to create reliable avoidance.

Think about what that means in practice.

In many cases, the options become permanent management, lifelong restriction of freedom, rehoming, or euthanasia.

The uncomfortable reality is that for some predatory behaviours, particularly those with a high risk of killing wildlife or livestock, reward-based training alone will not produce the level of reliability required to keep animals safe.

New Zealand understands this principle in other contexts. We recognise the value of aversion training when it comes to protecting native wildlife, including kiwi. The goal is not to punish animals for the sake of it. The goal is to create an association strong enough that the behaviour does not occur.

That’s why I find this position so surprising.

It reflects an ideology that appears increasingly focused on avoiding discomfort at all costs, even when the alternative may be a significantly poorer outcome for the dog, other animals, or both.

Good welfare is not the absence of all discomfort.

Good welfare is looking at the overall outcome.

Does the dog get to stay alive?

Does the dog get more freedom?

Are wildlife, livestock, and other animals safer?

Can the dog safely function in the real world?

Those are the questions that matter.

Training should be judged by the long-term welfare outcomes it creates, not by whether every moment of the training process is completely free of discomfort.

21/06/2026

Why I think force free dog training is a con.

And as far as I’m concerned, the force-free movement is on its last legs.

Not because rewards don’t work. They absolutely do.

I use rewards every single day.

The problem is ideology.

A good trainer should be able to train the dog in front of them and use whatever methods are required to bring out the best in both the dog and the owner relationship.

If that means using rewards in a smart way, then use rewards.

If that means applying aversives in a smart way, then use aversives.

If that means using both, then use both.

The dog doesn’t care about your ideology.

The dog cares about whether your training makes sense.

What frustrates me is watching owners spend years being told the same story. More management. More distance. More treats. More avoidance. More medication. More explanations about why the dog is still struggling.

Meanwhile, the dog’s world gets smaller and smaller.

The owner becomes more stressed.

And everyone pretends that standing 100 metres away from a trigger while feeding treats is progress.

At what point do we stop protecting ideologies and start asking harder questions?

At what point do we start measuring success by outcomes instead of intentions?

If you genuinely care about dogs, then your loyalty should be to the dog standing in front of you, not to a training philosophy.

Good trainers are flexible.

Good trainers are pragmatic.

Good trainers adapt.

The best trainers don’t ask, “What does my ideology allow me to do?”

They ask, “What does this dog need from me right now?”

Because if you truly care about dogs, you put your ideology aside and train the dog in front of you.

19/06/2026

Let’s talk about anxiety medication in dogs, the tool mostly used by the force free frauds!

In my experience, many of the dogs I see who have come in as behaviour cases have already been placed on SSRIs by vets or veterinary behaviourists, often alongside force-free management plans, sold to you as a “training” plan.

In some cases medication can reduce baseline anxiety enough to allow learning to take place, and that can be genuinely helpful when used appropriately and monitored properly, but this does not seem to be how they’re being used. There never seems to be a plan in place to remove the medication.

It’s also important to be honest about what it is and what it isn’t.

Some dogs do show a degree of emotional flattening or reduced reactivity on SSRIs, and in certain cases owners report that after the initial adjustment period there isn’t a meaningful change in the behaviours they were trying to address. Outcomes vary a lot depending on the individual dog, the environment, and how the medication is managed. In other words, SSRIs are not a magic behavioural software update that automatically fixes everything once the prescription is filled.

From a training perspective, what I’m ultimately aiming for is not a dog that is suppressed or dulled, but a dog that is engaged, responsive, confident, and able to experience and process the world properly.

For that reason, we generally require dogs to be weaned off SSRIs before starting work with us, under the guidance of their prescribing veterinarian. The reason is simple: we want to assess the dog that is actually in front of us, not a version whose behaviour may be altered by medication. It allows us to get a clearer picture of temperament, motivation, stress responses, learning ability, and the factors genuinely driving the behaviour. If we’re going to build a training plan, it helps to know what we’re actually working with rather than trying to interpret everything through a pharmaceutical filter.

That means we look at the whole picture: behaviour, learning history, environment, management, and emotional state. Then we build a training plan that develops clarity and skills without trying to override the dog’s personality or drive.

The goal isn’t to “medicate away” who the dog is. It’s to understand who the dog is, and then build the right framework so they can function safely and successfully in the real world.

What the whole video of the below here ->

https://youtu.be/qvouQ6EkoAM?si=OiWpLzcJaAWMNXJs

19/06/2026

E-collars are, in my view, one of the most effective tools available to modern dog trainers when used correctly.

Every dog in this video has had an e-collar used as part of their recall training. Every one of them is now off-lead. Every one of them is not wearing an e-collar. Every one of them is happy, engaged, confident, and far from being shut down or in a state of “learned helplessness.”

What they have is freedom.

Freedom is one of the greatest gifts you can give a dog. And if you think your front clip harness, longline and treats are better than real freedom then you need to have a hard think about yourself.

The freedom to run, explore, swim, hike, and enjoy life while still being safe and under control.

Too often, welfare is judged based on a single moment in time. A screenshot. A short video clip. One training repetition.

But welfare should be measured across the dog’s entire life.

Does the dog get more freedom or less?

Does the dog get to experience more of the world or less?

Does the dog have greater safety, reliability, and opportunities because of the training?

Those are the questions that matter.

A reliable recall isn’t a trick. It’s a safety behaviour. It’s what allows dogs to enjoy a level of freedom that many dogs never get to experience.

If we’re going to have honest conversations about welfare, we need to look at the overall quality of the dog’s life, not just a single training moment divorced from the bigger picture.

is a con

18/06/2026

This sort of thing is very common, and straight out of the force-free playbook.

Someone sees a 30-second clip, decides they know exactly what’s happening, and then proceeds to explain why you’re wrong. They present themselves as the educated one while implying you’re uninformed. Apparently, years of experience, assessments, planning, and hundreds of hours of work can all be accurately judged from a single moment on social media.

The reality is that if we took the time to unpack many of these arguments, it wouldn’t take long to discover that a lot of them are built on misunderstandings of the very science they’re quoting.

Let’s take learned helplessness as an example.

Learned helplessness was first observed in dogs by psychologists Martin Seligman and Steven Maier in 1967.

The learned helplessness experiments didn’t study the contingent use of punishment for specific behaviours. They studied the effects of inescapable and uncontrollable aversive events.

That’s the entire point.

The animals had no ability to influence the outcome. No ability to escape it. No ability to turn it off through their behaviour.

And even then, the researchers had to create extremely artificial and severe conditions to produce learned helplessness.

That is fundamentally different from a dog receiving a clear, predictable, contingent consequence for a specific behaviour.

Yet you’ll regularly see people throw around terms like “learned helplessness” as though mentioning the phrase automatically wins the argument.

It doesn’t.

Understanding a scientific term and understanding the science behind it are two very different things.

Every species experiences aversive, it’s literally part of learning. But if we are gonna pretend to be an expert like Monika here, you better actually know what you’re talking about.

17/06/2026

It’s also important to understand that this dog already has a very good understanding of what “come” means. The issue isn’t a lack of knowledge.

The reality is that he’s not stupid. As soon as the environment becomes more rewarding than the food, toy, or praise you have available, he’s going to choose that instead. That’s normal. Smart animals make choices based on consequences and competing motivations. Humans do exactly the same thing.

What changes the game is when the consequences become clear, predictable, and meaningful. When you make the “why” behind listening tangible to the dog, you can often achieve a level of reliability that rewards alone struggle to produce, especially in highly distracting environments.

And that’s important because recall isn’t a party trick. It’s not about obedience for obedience’s sake. A reliable recall is a safety behaviour. It can be the difference between a dog coming back when called and a dog chasing wildlife, running onto a road, disappearing into the bush, or getting itself into serious trouble.

What’s also worth noting is that this dog isn’t falling apart emotionally during the process. His tail barely drops, he’s engaged with the environment, he’s thinking, problem-solving, and making decisions. He’s certainly not scared of his own shadow, despite what some critics would have you believe.

The goal isn’t to create fear. The goal is to create clarity, accountability, and reliability while preserving the dog’s confidence and ability to think and he will always have the option to choice to not experience the consequence. The same way you have the option not to speed.

16/06/2026

Punishment is important, but it’s a small part of what it takes to build a well-thought-out training program.

(I use the e-collar in this video to punish him for biting me)

What’s important is that this wasn’t the first thing we did, and that even though we use the e-collar we are not left with a dog who is scared of his shadow (like some fraudulent dog trainers would lead you to believe)

When this dog arrived, he had a lot of emotional baggage around resources. If challenged, he’d bite. If that didn’t work, he’d spiral emotionally.

So before introducing any punishment, we spent time building trust, improving emotional resilience, and showing him that I wasn’t trying to go to war with him.

Only once that foundation was in place did we raise the criteria.

Think of it like touching a hot plate. The lesson isn’t traumatic because you already feel safe in the kitchen and you know how to avoid it all together in the future.

The same principle applies here.

This is why the idea that punishment automatically causes fallout is too simplistic. Timing, context, relationship, and emotional state matter.

When punishment is contingent, fair, and understandable there is no fall out.

But you do bring a huge amount of clarity. Clarity is kindness. Leaving a dog to struggle, because you never showed them what the wrong this is… now that is cruel

15/06/2026

Awesome session yesterday. This was Session #4 with this owner, and honestly, she deserves a huge shout-out because she is absolutely smashing it.

One of the coolest things to watch is not just the transformation in the dog, but the transformation in the owner as well.

We’ve seen this dog go from being reactive and struggling with both human and dog-related issues to having a huge amount of cooperation and control around distractions. As a result, his owner is feeling far more confident and less anxious when handling him.

And that’s important.

Because when owners feel more confident, dogs get more freedom.

They get to go more places, experience more of the world, and enjoy a better quality of life with their humans.

That’s what good dog training is really about.

There has been a smart application of both reinforcement and punishment where needed. Not an overreliance on either one, but a balanced approach that gives the dog clear information and helps create lasting change.

The result?

A dog that’s easier to live with.

An owner who’s more confident.

And a relationship that’s stronger than ever.

Dog training doesn’t have to take years to see some tangible results. It just requires us to understand the dog infront of us, and train in a way that isn’t ideologically based.

13/06/2026