Dog training pet peeves: The word "energy" and the misuse of the word "positive‪"‬ How To Train Your Dog With Love And Science - Dog Training with Annie Grossman, School For The Dogs

In the modern era of dog training, people often rush to blame a person or a dog's "energy" for behavior issues.  In this episode, Annie addresses why all the talk about using or observing "energy" in order to train a dog makes her cringe, and also why she thinks the misuse of the word "positive" leads to too many misunderstandings about science-based training. 

Notes:
John Watson's Psychology As The Behaviorist Views It - Free eBook edition
Fun Dog Fact Of The Day: Rowlf the Muppet was invented in order to sell dog food! Here he is making his debut in the early 1960s in a Purina commercial where he convinces his friend that dog chow is better than asparagus.  Then he eats his kibble with a spoon.

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Partial Transcript:

Annie:

Hello human listeners. So today I am going to talk about some of my pet peeves when it comes to dog training, specifically, words people use in the dog training domain that drive me a little bit nuts. Now,  if you've listened to this podcast before you might know that I generally think we use too many words with dogs in general. Too much talking goes on. I think we rely far too heavily on language when it comes to dog training. Considering that of all the many, many things that dogs and humans have alike, considering that we're both mammals living in the same time and place and environment and climate, etc, etc., language is a big thing, at least verbal language, is a big thing we don't have in common and I think there is too much focus on it in dog training. But I was specifically talking about, uh, words that we use with each other to discuss dog training.

And you know, I think that these words that I want to talk about, two words in particular, I think they kind of speak to some of the divides that exist in the dog training field. And I know as someone who came to dog training from a totally different career, totally different place that a lot of the disputes that exist among different dog trainers can just seem like insider baseball to those who exist outside of the world of dog training. And again, because I come from that place, I totally get it. I get that people probably have this point of view before they are,  sort of, in the world of training with their own dog or just because they're interested. I know that this point of view exists of, like, why does this matter? Why are you having these, you know, niggling observations about someone else doing something as simple as teaching a dog to sit. It's silly. He trained a dog to do something. The dog is trained. That's it. It's done. End of story. Let's not lose sleep over this. There are far more important things in the world to worry about.

And I mean obviously I no longer feel that way because I see the extremes of how people approach dog training. And in my opinion, not only is it a matter of ethics, how we treat our dogs, but thinking about how we train them and how their learning I think has a lot to do with how we treat each other and how we treat our children and how our children learn to treat each other and to treat animals. And there's certainly an aspect of animal welfare that has to do with training. And there are a lot of dogs who I think are hurt more than we realized more than we realize  because of the widespread acceptance of dog training methods that I and many others consider inhumane.  But that kind of I think get lumped together under this dog training heading of... this heading of dog training and all the things that fall under it..

Full Transcript available at SchoolfortheDogs.com/Podcasts/