06/04/2026
What is abuse, what is ethical, and what is actually right?
Can we really all agree on what ethics means? The answer is no. Ethics are not the same for everyone. We cannot have one clear definition that leads to a universal agreement. The same applies to logic, and the same applies to certain words, such as the word animal abuse.
When we hear the word abuse, our mind immediately goes to extremes. Someone with a whip. Someone using tools that physically hurt the animal. Someone shouting, someone screaming. We imagine intense, obvious situations. These images are so strong that they leave very little space to consider anything else. But reality is not only that.
If I say that it is abuse for a dog to wear a collar and be pulled by the neck, for many people this is not abuse. For many, this is normal. The same applies to a dog on a one meter leash. For some, this is completely acceptable. In the same way, it is often considered normal to shape, to manipulate, almost like clay, the personality and the movement of a dog, simply because we have known for many years that we can influence any animal if we hold food in our hands. This is what is called “positive reinforcement”, what is widely referred to as positive training.
I hold the food, I show you what I want, I reward the behavior I want, and in that way I guide you. I push you, gently, to comply. I lead you to obey. It appears as if you are choosing, but in reality the choice has already been made for you. For so called positive trainers, this is not abuse. But for another group of trainers, who define abuse as anything that removes even the minimum level of freedom from an animal, things look very different.
Where the dog chooses to sniff, the pace at which the dog walks, forcing an animal to move exactly at your rhythm, forcing a dog to keep all of its attention on you, forcing a dog to ignore the world around it, forcing any animal to do something that is not within its natural behavior. For some people, all of this is abuse. For others, it is positive training. And of course, for more traditional, more punishment based trainers, all of this sounds like nonsense, because in their view a dog is a tool that should obey.
And this brings us to the word obedience. What is obedience? Very often we hear people say, “your child is very obedient”, and they are talking about a human being. Personally, I would feel deeply uncomfortable if my child was obedient, because obedience means I listen and act based on someone else, without my own choice, without my own thinking, without my own intelligence.
What we truly want is not obedience. We want to build personalities. Personalities that remain what they were born to be, without being distorted. Personalities that stay intact, that are not suppressed, but that learn to understand certain social boundaries.
Being an ethical trainer does not mean being permissive, and it does not mean being controlling. It does not mean allowing chaos, and it does not mean the absence of rules. Of course there are rules. Of course there are things that are allowed and things that are not. We all have rules in our homes. For example, some people do not want a dog on the couch. This is not abuse. It is a boundary. But how you communicate that boundary, how you teach it, is what can determine whether something becomes abusive or not.
Forcing a dog to stay permanently in one specific area of the house and calling that “the dog’s place” is fundamentally different from simply not allowing the dog on the couch. In one case, you are setting a boundary. In the other, you are imposing a condition that you chose, without knowing if it is comfortable, if it is suitable, if it is warm or cold, if it meets the needs of the dog, who cannot verbally explain any of this to you. And very often, this is enforced through food, through what we call the “carrot”. The dog complies not necessarily because it is comfortable or because it agrees, but because it wants the reward, even if at the same time it is uncomfortable, stressed, or not well.
So the question becomes whether this is a choice or a necessity. This is where something important enters the conversation, science. We can all have opinions, we can all have ideas about what is abusive, what is correct, what is harmful, what creates long term stress or pain, whether in dogs or in children. But science measures, science tests, science observes, and science provides results.
As years go by, just as education systems have evolved, just as physical punishment in schools has been removed in many places, just as our understanding of discipline has changed, the same is happening in the way we approach behavior. Even in correctional systems, the very word correction has a different meaning from punishment. Correction implies helping someone return, understand, and regain balance. Punishment simply imposes consequences. We now know that punishment carries risks. It can produce results, but it often comes with significant side effects.
This is why it is no longer enough to say “this is what I believe”. We need to ask if there is research, if there is evidence, if there is updated knowledge. And this is where things become difficult, because knowledge is not static. Knowledge is alive. It moves. It evolves. Being open to letting go of old knowledge requires strength, emotional strength, because we do not only learn things, we attach to them. They become part of our identity.
So it takes awareness to say that what I knew, I am willing to let go of. It takes determination, it takes courage, it takes willingness, because the ego is natural, it is strong, it is part of us. But growth requires that we move beyond it.
And very often, instead of changing the reality, we change the words. The cage becomes a crate. The cage becomes a “safe space”. The whip becomes a motivator. The electric collar becomes an educator. But changing the word does not change the reality. It only makes it easier to accept.
So in the end, the question is not only what is abuse, what is ethical, what is right and what is wrong. The real question is whether we are willing to see things as they are, and support what we say with knowledge, with research, and with honesty.
© Artemis Tzoulianna Antoniou
CR PDTE Greece
DogWithin Ethical Training
Listen With Your Eyes™
