24/03/2022
Long, but we’ll worth a read while you have a cuppa…
Dog training is an industry rooted in normalised abuse. That isn’t to say that all, or even most, trainers are abusive, by any means. But smacking, kicking, scruffing, shocking, scaring and prodding dogs have all been viewed as valid, and until relatively recently, totally normal ways of punishing dogs.
Here’s a page from an old book I found in the Kennel Club library. It’s worth noting that the Kennel Club doesn’t endorse this book, or recommend any of its methods, it was just in their private library amongst hundreds of other older training manuals, as a record of days gone by. This picture was not only simply captured, but the author deemed it a useful image to be printed in their book. He wasn’t ashamed of it, or afraid of backlash, because it wasn’t abnormal.
Other training methods detailed in these old books included binding a gundog’s mouth shut whilst holding a dummy, so that they don’t drop them whilst retrieving, using pliers to clamp down on their ear or lips to “encourage” the dog to drop the dummy once retrieved, and pinning an aggressive dog to the floor until they submit.
All of these methods are still used today. That last one is even used by trainers on television, and is recognised as a leading method of knocking a “dominant” dog down a peg.
Except dominance, at least in the way we have been taught it, doesn’t exist in dogs. There’s no “top dog”, there’s no “all-powerful alpha,” and your dog certainly isn’t going to challenge you to become the dominant figure in your household. That dominance model, described in wolves, has been debunked time and time again. But not before dog trainers got their hands on it.
Wolves live in families, with a mum and a dad, not in a linear hierarchy with an omnipotent male and female dictatorship. Besides, dogs aren’t wolves. They are a subspecies of grey wolf, with thousands of years of domestication changing their morphology and psychology. They’re neonatal, babyish, infantile… Dave the Yorkshire terrier doesn’t want to rule the world when he asks to sit on the sofa, he just wants a cosy spot to sleep.
But the whole “alpha” idea in dog training left a stain. We think our dogs are using violence to challenge us, so that totally validates our use of violence as a rebuttal, right? If you don’t pin a growing dog to the ground until their body goes limp, they will never know who is their boss?
Except, that’s not what’s happening. Like us, dogs perform behaviours for a reason. There is a function behind the way they act. If your dog isn’t growling for dominance (and they aren’t), then why are they?
Why would you act in an aggressive way? Maybe you’re feeling threatened. Maybe you’re in pain, so you have a shorter tether. Maybe you’re low on sleep, and are feeling snappy. Maybe you have had a bad day, and are more sensitive due to that. Maybe any of these reasons are why your dog is growling. And a scared, painful, tired, stressed animal being held to the ground until they’re too tired to keep fighting, and go limp in helplessness, isn’t helping. It’s abuse masquerading as training.
This is the crux of it. Perhaps what we see in this photograph isn’t the norm anymore, but dog training still has a long way to go before we can fully shake ourselves from the crimes done to animals in the past.
We all have to begin somewhere, and as horrific as it is, we needed these original trainers in order for us to evolve and learn more. They probably didn’t realise what they were doing was wrong, as you only know as much as you know. But nowadays, we do know more. Information is freely available online. We don’t need to abuse dogs anymore, in the name of training. There isn’t the excuse that trainers had fifty years ago- we must do better.
We parade around as a superior species, yet we don’t apply our empathy or critical thinking, instead simply resorting to violence when faced with a scared animal. Do better.
