11/20/2025
Shelters can barely keep up
The elephant in the room that sentences owners and dogs to suffer: society’s current disdain for honest, transparent, logic-rather-than-emotion-based conversations about punishment.
Which leads to the natural space we’re in now: owners having no idea how to properly, effectively, and humanely punish their dog’s unwanted behavior.
When the topic is clearly taboo, and when anyone bold enough to honestly discuss it is met with incredible social punsihment, then the natural outcome is that these critical conversations aren’t shared.
And so owners remain in the dark about the aspect of training they almost certainly need more than anything else.
Go peruse the online dog training spaces and see what you find. What you’ll find—almost exclusively—is unending feel good dog training content: How to use treats to get your dog to sit or down (for a second but not with any reliability around distractions), to recall (sometimes), to walk on a loose leash (as long as the world remains serene and challenge free). Or deeply “empathetic” and morally approved management and avoidance techniques packaged as training that promise dazzling results but deliver nothing but disappointment. Or the endless propagandistic memes warning you against the dangers of punishment—and covertly, or overtly—reminding you that only a monster would use such a thing.
But when it comes to finding information about how to actually stop the stuff that gets dogs surrendered and killed, the stuff owners truly need to know how to resolve… crickets.
How do you stop:
-Incessant barking when you’re at work?
-Destruction of prized property?
-Separation anxiety/crate breaking?
-Resource guarding?
-Explosive reactivity that makes walks stress-filled, dangerous, undoable?
-P**p eating?
-Dog fights in the home?
-Aggression towards owners or guests?
-Trash diving?
-PICA?
Of course we need to fulfill our dogs via proper exercise, play, training etc., but many behavior issues won’t disappear even with these in place. So then what?
Search around and see what you find. You’ll find all manner of feel good solutions—which don’t deliver the desired results, but sure sound nice. Keep looking to see what you find about detailed, nuanced, step-by-step punsihment protocols.
You almost certainly won’t find anything. And so if you want to know why so many dogs will end up in shelters and euthanized, that’s the why.
Which means, until we’re able to have honest, transparent, reality-based, and emotionally mature conversations about punishment, the suffering with inevitably continue.
