20/04/2023
Spot on! And oh sooooo common!
This is an easy mistake for owners to make. Your vet is the educated expert you trust your dog’s physical well-being with. And so when questions about training or behavior issues arise, it’s only natural that you turn to the very expert you most trust to keep your dog healthy and safe.
But there’s a problem. Most vets will have zero actual real world training experience, and thus will have zero trustworthy training advice. That doesn’t mean they haven’t had some superficial, and often dubious, training courses—many have—but what it does mean is that it’s the extremely rare vet who has actually gone out and trained numerous dogs with numerous training goals/issues, and found real world answers/solutions.
Think about that for a moment. You’re taking training advice from someone who almost certainly has never engaged in any deep, ongoing, varied training work. They’ve almost certainly never worked with a large sample of clients, and a large sample of dogs, and had to find training/behavioral answers for them.
What they have done is studied extremely deeply the medical side of helping animals. And that’s why the easy-to-miss overlap, and the easy-to-miss overstep, is so easy to miss. Vets are so closely tied to your dog’s well-being, and so knowledgeable in one facet of their well-being—and likely the most trusted expert you have for your dog in general—that it’s easy to assume they actually know what’s best for your dog when it comes to training and behavior issues.
And so, because of this misplaced trust, and misbegotten authority, many owners find themselves being recommended purely positive trainers, and/or tools which align with the purely positive training agenda, medications like Prozac when these approaches inevitably don’t work—and with the current ridiculously silly fad of the fear-free movement…being told (often in a condescendingly chastising tone) that they cannot use certain tools with their dogs at their facilities.
Just to be clear, this isn’t a vet-trashing post. I’ve had many cherished vets who’ve guided me through some of the most difficult, worrisome, and painful moments of life with my dogs. I’ll always be deeply thankful for their kindness and medical expertise. But I never once turned to them for training advice, and they never once were so presumptuous as to offer it…or worse, attempt to enforce some version of it.
For all of you owners out there, I urge you to step back and think about what I said above. Think about the fact that your vet has almost certainly NOT ever functioned in any real capacity as a trainer. They’ve never had to find solutions which their livelihoods and career reputations depended on. What they have been are animal medical doctors, who because of this one area of expertise have been viewed—or far worse—have placed themselves in the position of being training/behavioral experts. But the one field of expertise has nothing to do with the other.
I would never think to offer any serious medical advice, which could have serious ramifications on a dog’s health—because I have no true expertise in that field. And yet, we find many veterinarians who will happily make training/behavioral recommendations—which will be imbued with their medical expert status—which therefore owners will take as gospel, and which could, and often do have seriously deleterious effects.
Owners, it’s up to you to be the most informed consumers possible. You can’t offload the responsibility to anyone. Not your vet, not your trainer, not your friends or family. Do your own research and your own critical thinking. Then, make your own decisions about what you think is best, and who you think is best. And take anyone attempting to occupy that place of responsibility, and looking to remove your agency/ability to explore and discern and decide on your own, as someone to be highly suspicious of. Only you stand between what’s best and something possibly very different for your dog. The only defense against poor information is you becoming more knowledgeable.
PS, And don’t get me started on veterinary behaviorists. There’s very little that’s worse, or more dangerous than someone leveraging the status of medical and behavior “expert”, but who’s almost certainly been indoctrinated and consumed by the purely positive ideology which has completely indoctrinated and consumed their industry. If you can find one who has a collection of video evidence of their work with many, many serious dogs—video evidence as impressive as their credentials—then by all means dive in. But if all you find are credentials, this is one field where sadly, the credentials aren’t nearly enough to trust. In fact, if that’s all they have, I’d run the other way. This is an industry infamous for its ineptitude, exorbitant prices, and terribly disappointing results. Approach with appropriately extreme caution.
PPS, Are there exceptions to the above? Of course. There’s always exceptions. But there’s a reason they’re called exceptions.
