The Dog Training Disfigurement

There has been a flood of new dog trainers promoting themselves on social media. Nothing wrong with someone wanting to be a dog trainer, it is a great thing to work with dogs and make their lives better. But that isn't what they are promoting. What they are doing is making dogs lives worse.

A simple example: I saw a post yesterday of one of these new trainers who claimed it is harmful to play with your dog, and that only dogs should play with dogs. I think this is an extrapolation of the dog whisperer craze. It started with the mantra of "calm submissive". Thus, dogs no longer could be happy go lucky, they had to show appeasement behaviors and lay around like a carpet. I also saw several other offshoots over the past few days. Old school style training has also come back like a rerun of Friday the 13th... basically breaking dogs down with some kind of force. Most of these people don't even like dogs. They do like your money, however.

None of this is good dog training. None of these people should be listened to, but nowadays, someone with 30 years of respectable training practices can be drowned out by new people who have become visible through social media applications. They purport to be experts, arrogant, proclaiming expertise and experience that they don't have. I saw a trainer claiming that their business had nearly 100 years of experience... but reading their materials they probably have about 2 year of actual experience, and then adding up all their employees up to a figure of 100 years. 

The good trainers are speaking out, but everyone appears to be an expert on social media. And liars will be liars. Social media has this weird effect where an expert can debate a novice, but since they are on the same platform, it appears that they are on the same level. And the novice can fake their experience for the moment in such a confrontation. 

Meanwhile, I feel sorry for all the poor dogs getting this treatment. I heard a couple of years ago that someone was trying to implement, into law, a mandatory dog training union of some sort to regulate dog training. That will doom the dog training industry and harm a lot of dogs, being even worse than what is going on now. Every decision would become politically correct to satisfy whomever is good at getting in control of that organization. Imagine a parents union that was formed to tell you how to raise your kids, with mandatory membership if you were to have a kid and penalties if you didn't conform. Guess how that would work out. Great, a new form of Communism.

I've been encouraging the good dog trainers to speak out. Challenge these nutty ideas and start teaching proper dog training methods. Yes, you will get pushback, but do it anyway. 

I could name names, but that wouldn't br wise. I'll just say that a lot of the more visible social media dog trainers are no good Yankee liars... oops, sorry... I have been thinking about watching the movie Shane, again... they are no good liars. They are uneducated idiots. They don't have their claimed experience and their arrogance is not warranted or appreciated. They are disfiguring an honorable profession in order to get social media clicks. Don't pin your hopes on taking their advice. 

Plan accordingly.