Dog people like to do this.

This past week I heard that clicker training was confusing to dogs and not providing clear information. Which meant that is was borderline abusive. Hmm. Okay.

I’ve heard the idea floated that in order to have a reliable dog, you need to use some sort of a correction device in training. That dogs won’t chose to do the “right” thing unless they know that they have to, unless the boundary has been made clear.

I read a blog post that pointed to a young dog’s less than stellar behavior in public being attributed to the use of treats in training.

In short, what I’ve been hearing is if we see results that we don’t think are ideal, we usually spring right to blaming the method rather than evaluating if the trainer in question really knows what the heck they’re doing.

And if we see a dog who is behaving as we thing they should, then we kind of assume that the trainer must be doing something right – AKA, training in a similar way that we would.

How often do we stop and consider that maybe it’s the operator? Maybe people who can’t produce a reliably trained dog with clicker training have poor timing skills?

Maybe those dogs who won’t recall were never properly proofed?

Maybe that person using cookies was relying on the cookies to do the work rather than just using the strategically as rewards and actively building a multi dimensional relationship with their dog? (hint – if you let the cookies do all the work, when you take those cookies away then the motivation is gone)

Maybe that young dog had a poor genetic temperament and was being pushed in over his head?  Maybe it’s people had no clue how to handle it?

There are a lot of reasons reward based training fails. And most are handler related.

What I do know is that I was able to train a dog in search work using reward/clicker based training and only the occasional verbal correction. And while he isn’t *perfect* and still has his “dog” moments, he is pretty darn good, works great and listens and responds quite well. If I take him out in public, most people would like to have him as a poster dog for their method of training.

I’m pretty sure by this point I’ve got all the reward based trainers nodding in unison and saying “yes” (no pun intended 😉 ).

But I see some of the same assuming the worst from that side, too. While I don’t agree with doing the majority of training with an e-collar, I have seen some dogs who have been trained with them who are happy, well rounded dogs.  I have seen others who were really helped by the fact that the ecollar allowed them some freedom to run around free and burn off steam while still being “attached” to their owner.

The bottom line is, if you’re timing sucks, or you have poor training skills, then your dog is going to be confused. If you let the tool do the work, then it’s going to fail. Don’t assume that the method is inherently faulty when the operator has never really learned how to do it.

P.S. While I’m not exactly in the anti-ecollar/prong collar camp, I will say that if people are’t going to take time and learn the importance of how timing relates to training, I’d MUCH rather see them confusing their dog with cookies and a clicker. And I absolutely love how my dogs light up at training time and beg to first in line to work with me as I dole out those cookies and clearly let them know what I want.