04/09/2025
Love this!
All healthy relationships require respect, reciprocity, and good clear communication. It's no different with our dogs.
It’s fascinating to watch the training world search high and low for the latest, coolest, most novel technique/approach/insight.
Meanwhile, probably one of the most profound aspects of training and the creation of healthy or unhealthy perceptions, and thus creation of healthy or unhealthy relationships, and thus the creation of healthy or unhealthy human/canine cohabitation… is completely ignored, or simply not seen.
So many view dog training as a superficial game of positive and negative inputs that simply cultivate desired behavior. But yet they never seem to see that these “inputs” are doing far more than cultivating surface level behavior. All of these “inputs” are telling our dogs about who we are, who they are, how we should be treated, and how they should be treated.
These “inputs” are cultivating a huge portion of our relationship and association dynamics.
It’s why folks who only (or almost only) share positive reinforcement with their dogs often find themselves with high performing dogs but who have terrible attitudes (bratty, pushy, disrespectful) and treat their humans like the doormats they’ve presented themselves as.
If all you are is a constant green light and a reward machine, you shouldn’t be surprised when your dog runs with that info and treats you accordingly.
On the contrary, if you appropriately punish your dog for unwanted, undesired, unhealthy behavior, you not only are reducing or stopping that specific behavior, you’re also having a profoundly deep conversation with your dog about the fact that you are a being that has rules, that has boundaries, that is to be treated with appropriate respect and deference — and that in the case of this all not occurring, unsavory consequences will indeed occur.
Unfortunately, the majority of dogs we work with are the way they are simply because they’ve never learned that humans are creatures worthy of granting polite, deferential, respectful, and healthy behavior towards. Not because they’re unable to do so, but simply because the humans have never cultivated that much needed belief by way of sharing healthy, relationship-balancing consequences in both directions.
Properly applied punishment, while viewed as unsavory, unsophisticated, unnecessary, and usually abusive by the ignorant or brainwashed, is often the key reset button that puts wayward dogs back on the right track and allows positive reinforcement to be something actually positive and healthy.
