21/07/2025
This is one of those posts I was hesitent to transfer from my thoughts to a word document. Mainly because i cant flesh it out meaningfully enough. But here it is anyway. When I started training, I believed what a lot of punishment-based trainers still believe: that if you want to get rid of biting, you have to show the dog, unequivocally, that it won’t be tolerated. That the threat of a consequence has to outweigh the urge to bite. It felt like the responsible thing to do.
Over the years, I’ve come to see it differently.
No matter what kind of training you do, positive reinforcement, balanced, compulsion, when it comes to dangerous behaviors like biting, management will always be part of the picture. You can suppress biting through punishment. You can teach a dog that the context in which biting once occurred doesn’t require that response anymore. You can even help a dog feel differently, safer, more regulated, more at ease.
But what you can never do is go back in time and erase the fact that biting worked. That it solved a problem. That it made something scary go away. You can’t un-teach a dog that biting is effective. You can only build enough safety, trust, and structure that the dog stops believing it’s necessary.
And even then, even if you do everything right, you can’t guarantee the dog won’t someday be caught off guard. Find themselves overwhelmed in a moment they weren’t prepared for. And in that moment, they might reach for the one thing that’s always worked. A bite.
This isn’t a call for fear. It’s a call for respect. For humility. And for reflection.
Because our job isn’t just to change behavior, it’s to protect the people who live with these dogs, and the dogs themselves. That means confronting hard truths, no matter what quadrant you train in.
I’m not advocating for hopelessness or euthanasia. I’m advocating for the end of a very dangerous kind of sales pitch, the one that says “my system will solve your dog’s problems permanently.” That’s not real life. And if we keep pretending it is, we set people, and their dogs, up to fail.
And I want to say this, too: I know this topic stirs strong emotions. I’ve spent countless hours thinking about it over the years, from every angle. It’s a complicated issue, one that spans welfare, ethics, responsibility, and risk. And not the least of it is this: the kind of relationship a dog has with their person is itself a form of management. It deserves just as much thought and care as any tool or protocol we use.
