The Dish by Darcie

Dog training has changed so much over the past 40 years. Can you hear the dogs applauding and singing the praises of the trainers who have evolved?! I can. There are hundreds and thousands of dog trainers who have changed from the old school jerk and pull, choke and shock methods to the methods of Ian Dunbar, Patricia B. McConnell, Karen Pryor, and Pat Miller from the Whole Dog Journal, just to name a few, and the dogs are the better for it. Trainers who change and evolve, moving to positive training (in my personal dictionary “positive training” means no harm) say that they can’t believe they stuck with the old methods for so long. Truly positive training is easier on the dog and the person and the training stays with the dog for a lifetime. Trainers tell me, and you’ll see this in new books coming out too, that they cry when they think of the things they did to dogs way back when in the name of training. It’s sometimes hard to forgive oneself when there has been unnecessary hurt especially when you love dogs so much.

The most prominent of the old style dog handlers is Cesar Millan. It’s only because of TV but it’s as it is. I keep trying so hard to give Cesar Millan an A on his shows. That show impacts so many dogs’s lives. I watched the most recent one about a dog who was tearing up the front door trying to get out whenever his people left him alone. As I watched the good and positive treatment of the dog by Cesar, I breathed a sigh of relief. Good. A show I can write about and praise Cesar for his good guidance to his TV viewers. He showed the people how to crate train the dog and once the dog was happy in his crate, the dog calmed down. The next scene was a split screen. The dog in the the house, the people and Cesar outside watching on a monitor. Here’s what seemed to happen.

The dog was left alone and seemed to be calm. He went to the window to look outside. He looked at the door but didn’t approach the door at all, even though the opening scene of the show showed the dog tearing the molding off of the door and bloodying himself mouth and feet trying to get out. I was pleased to see the calmness and thought that all was well. Then I noticed something and had to rewind and watch again. The dog had flinched and become rigid when he approached the window. What was that? So I rewound the whole scene to watch again. Here’s what really happened.

Aw, there it was, the reason for the flinch and the wariness. The dog was wearing a shock collar. And there was a ScatMat on the floor in front of the door. I don’t have a lot of trouble with the ScatMat, I think it’s the least hurtful of any of the battery driven disciplines and if a dog is harming itself, a ScatMat can make a life saving difference. I carry these in the SitStay store hoping that people will use it instead of a shock collar.

So as I watched the rewind, the dog did not approach the door at all…because the ScatMat was there. He apparently hadn’t been trained to or calmed down enough to stay away from the door, he was avoiding the ScatMat. As he approached the window and flinched he was hesitant to move again at all. There is the shock collar on his neck. Someone had just pushed the button, had just shocked him. He seemed to stay rigid and still not knowing what would cause another shock to come. I’d have to guess that it was Cesar with the shock collar button, he was watching the dog approach the window on the monitor.

The biggest problem I have with this episode is that a shock collar was used but a close second to that was that the shock collar and ScatMat were never mentioned. Not once. Nothing at all about either of them. I wouldn’t have noticed either if the dog hadn’t flinched and I watch closely for anything out of place or different from the words that are being spoken by Cesar and the narrator. Viewers who don’t know dogs or the products may not have seen those things or wouldn’t have questioned them because they weren’t pointed out at all during the entire episode.

So it appeared that simply training the dog to a crate for calming, then letting the dog have the run of the house did the trick. It wasn’t true. It didn’t happen that way. We didn’t get to see what was edited out so we don’t know how many times the dog, who was truly at the peak of anxious energy and had no regard for his own pain in the beginning of the show, got shocked or stepped onto the ScatMat before he learned to avoid those things or react to them.

The show this season seems to be trying to keep it’s viewers this year by appearing to change to more positive training. There are the die hard viewers who’ll continue to watch the reruns and continue to love the show but more and more I see that Cesar, or his producers, are trying hard to change the format to appear positive. There has to be a reason for that. Maybe viewers have started to get smart about what they are seeing and have started to move away from the show. I’m happy that the show is trying to at least appear to change, I hope they will continue to evolve and start telling the whole truth in every episode so the viewer can have some transparency on how the training or psychology is put into play.

Dislike the show or love it, shocking a dog can’t really be called “psychology” can it?

I’m still hoping to see an episode with completely positive training. I know that Cesar can do it. He has such a following, can you imagine what he could do and the changes that could be made for the dogs collectively if he went full bore positive? Evolution from jerk and pull and shock to real dog psychology without pain or hurt is the miracle I’m praying for.

For those of you who love Cesar, I’ve said it before and I still believe it. That he is a guy with a good heart. He said it himself that he’s changed a great deal from a culture where women are second class citizens, he used to treat his wife pretty badly he says, to a kind and loving husband. Maybe he’s just in need of some more evolution and understanding to understand that no hurt to dogs feels better and works better, too. One day he’ll start treating the dogs with the same changed kindness that he chose to with his wife. Honor, cherish, understanding, and respect for another breathing being.

I could sit on my butt and keep my mouth shut and never say another word about trainers who use jerking, choking, shock collars. That’s not likely to happen. My words and those of other positive trainers and consultants have made a life saving difference for so many dogs. Why would we stop? The dogs love us.

Thanks for listening. – Darcie

Albert Einstein is noted for the quote, “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

When I was in the chiropractor’s office, I over heard a woman say this to a man. It struck me that we’re all a bit insane then, look at the things people do.

Drinking to excess: Drink, get drunk, fall down or go dizzy to sleep, wake up feeling horrible and often all with having made complete fools of ourselves.

Gambling: Put the money in, push the button and although the pictures are different each time, the results are the same. The casino gets all the money in the end, they have to pay for all that dinging noise and all those pretty lights!

Dog training: The old methods of dog training where the same thing is practiced over and over again to get it right. Jerk the dog’s neck because he’s pulling and he continues to pull. Yell “Shut UP!!!!” from the comfy chair and the dog continues to bark. Kick, hit, pound on and hurt the dogs for jumping, counter surfing, chasing small animals, and essentially not minding our every command…and the dog continues to do it.

I learned a long, long time ago that a drink is a nice thing for me, two drinks and I start to tell my life story, three drinks and I will show you how silly, you can read that stupid if you like, I can be. It’s better for me to drink in moderation and keep my dignity. The last time I had more than one beer is still a pretty well told story in my family. My son and a friend of mine had gone to a Mexican cafe. I ordered tacos and a beer. They brought me another beer and I drank that, too. These weren’t little beers and I am not very big. When we went out the door to walk back to where we were having a meeting, I was tilting to the right, sliding my right foot out in kind of a plia, giggling saying something like, “I’m really, really dizzy. Is the sidewalk all slopey here?” much to the entertainment of the growing crowd on the sidewalk.

Gambling, I’ve done my share of that. My family lives in Reno so going out to dinner and playing nickels after is pretty usual. I’ve had some luck, well beginners luck, I haven’t won anything in years. But this is how it goes. Put the money in, push a button, watch all the pretty pictures, listen to the noise, bells and dinging ringing, and nothing. Nothing. Push the button again. Same thing. Or maybe a little payback, just enough to get you to push the button again. It works way, way too well to keep people coming back again and again to drop their paycheck or for those who have some control, a portion of their paycheck. The casinos are making a killing. Aside from knowing how silly it is to keep putting more money in to watch it happen again and again, it’s the perfect definition of clicker training. And why clicker training works so well. Put money in and push button (click to mark that behavior), give something that makes us want to push again, pretty pictures or a little money back (treat). Dogs are just as susceptible to that conditioning as we are. The only difference is, we fade the clicker and the treat and we’ll still get the behavior from the dog simply because we ask, no more gambling necessary until the next trick. And treats are cheap for the good we get from them. People’s brains have a hard time not falling in love with the reinforcement of gambling and that takes more and more money. It’s okay for the dogs, not so much for the people who want a place to live and some groceries on the table.

Dog training: I don’t use the old method of jerk and pull with the dog, I quit much earlier than some trainers did, I just couldn’t keep hurting them, it was breaking my heart and it wasn’t working. Just like everyone else who learned training from the “old pros”, yes, I did it to dogs, too, in structured obedience classes. I am not proud of it and I remember thinking at the time that there had to be a better way. Every time I jerked a dog’s neck, I felt awful. It had to hurt and it didn’t work so what the heck were we doing that for? Insanity. My own home training with reinforcing the behavior I wanted, just like I did with my kids who were wonderful children, was a much, much better way and the dogs were trained quickly.

We have some new books at SitStay.com. See New at SitStay in the left menu or go to books to see them all. The Thinking Dog is one of my new personal favorites.

I choose to stop the insanity. I’ll keep my drinking moderate, be silly if I want to but not because I’ve imbibed and have no control, and I’ll wake up happy and clear headed every morning. I’ll keep my hard earned money, most of it anyway, remember I do have to go out with the family. Well, I don’t have to throw my money away, nobody is twisting my arm! And I’ll train the dogs with sane consideration for another living being.

I love dogs. It feels good to be sane. – Darcie

A young family was at the house today. They told me that a few years ago they adopted a terrier who had some issues, nothing major at the time but definitely in need of some training. They’d watched Cesar Millan’s The Dog Whisperer and saw dogs doing things like their dog was doing and being fixed by Cesar “like it was magic”, so they tried it on their dog. They did everything he told them to, walked, no affection before discipline, and they handled the dog just like they’d seen him do on TV. They lifted him high off the ground when he tried to attack someone, using a leash up close behind his ears, they ‘alpha rolled’ him when he threw a temper tantrum, they cornered him to catch him and put pressure on him to move him away from things, “touched” him with a foot, grabbed him with a hand that was suppose to be translated as “a bite by the dominant dog”, and made the sound ’ssst’ just like Caesar showed them. Their dog went from warning people to stay away from him to attacking with no warning at all. Now they have a dog who is so aggressive, no one can look even at him.

After several weeks, which is what the TV programs told them, they thought they’d have a great dog with good behaviors. They quit using the TV show’s methods when the dog got worse instead of better.

To this day when they have company, no one can look at the dog at all. If their eyes happen on the dog, they reach to pet, speak to or try to come into the house, the dog attacks. This young family doesn’t want to put him down because he is pretty good with the Mom, who adopted the dog, and pretty good with the Dad. The children have to completely ignore the dog to be in the same house with him. When he warms up to them, then they can carefully pet him until the next time they come into the house.

These are the stories I’ve been hearing from people who use the show’s methods to train or change their dogs’ behavior. They are creating biting dogs when they only hoped to do the right thing for the dog.

I gave them some ideas to keep everyone safe and strongly suggested that they find professional positive training. I hope they take my advice and get some help. The dog has already bitten and means to bite again when he attacks. If they stay in touch with me, I’ll share the end of the story with you.

The TV show warns and warns against trying the methods at home because partly, I believe, the training you see on TV is not complete. What you see on TV is not all there is to it. If you are having behavioral problems with your dog, please find a positive trainer and get them to help you. Even some of the worst dogs have been turned around with positive training. The best thing? The positive training is more likely to stick with the dog. The old traditional training may change things for the short time while someone strong and unafraid is in the room, but it probably won’t last. I have noticed on the new episodes that even Cesar is saying that this is not magic, it takes time and effort. I’m happy to see that no episode this season has ended by claiming a cure like in the past several years of shows.

The ironic part of this story is that I just watched a new The Dog Whisperer on TV. Cesar was dealing with this same problem only with a bulldog, not a terrier. The problem with the terrier was created with the old episodes of the program and “fixed” with a disclaimer that the bulldog was not “cured” in the new episode. The dog on the new TV episode will probably always be scarred but at least they are managing his biting now. There were a few stitches in faces shown on this new episode. It just doesn’t have to be that way.

[If you saw this new episode, you saw one of our SitStay Service and Therapy Dog Vests being used for the series, the vest is on backwards but that's not the part you should notice. Cesar had a warning embroidered on the vest that said don't touch or look at this dog. That did help warn people to stay away so the dog would not bite them.]