02/01/2026
⚠️Long Post Ahead ⚠️
Experiences, learning, and how dogs actually decide what matters.
This comes off the back of some very honest discussions I’ve been having with another trainer I highly respect in this industry, conversations that have pushed me to look critically at my own work, particularly with my Malinois. Not from a place of shame or blame, but from a place of growth.
We talk a lot in dog training about “positive” and “negative” experiences nas if we can neatly categorise the world for dogs and decide how they should feel about it.
But biologically, dogs don’t need us to teach them how to seek what feels good or avoid what feels unpleasant. That’s already built in. Attraction to safety and comfort, avoidance of discomfort or threat that happens automatically, without conscious thought.
If it didn’t, we wouldn’t survive.
You don’t stand at the edge of a cliff and logically weigh up whether you should walk off it. Your nervous system stops you long before your brain gets involved. Avoidance of unpleasant or dangerous things is instinctual.
And this is where I think the conversation around learning often misses the point.
For context, Reba, my dog was introduced to the e-collar at around nine months of age. It was conditioned as a communication tool, not intended to be painful but let’s be honest, any e-collar is uncomfortable by design. That’s why dogs avoid it. However theres a difference between discomfortand and pain.
And this is where things get oversimplified.
Conditioning a tool doesn’t automatically prepare a dog for every situation you might want to use it in.
Conditioning teaches a dog what a sensation means and how to make it stop.
It doesn’t automatically teach emotional regulation.
It doesn’t automatically teach impulse control.
And it doesn’t automatically create avoidance when motivation is high.
An e-collar can function as communication in one context, a consequence in another, and something a dog is willing to override entirely in a third, depending on the dog, the reinforcement available, the learning history, and the emotional weight of the moment.
Later on, a situation arose involving my cat. The cat jumped out unexpectedly during a walk and, in a split second, my dog reacted. Since then, that experience has carried weight.
When we later attempted to address this through a controlled set-up, something became very clear.
By this stage, she was already habituated to the collar.
She understood how to turn pressure on.
She understood how to turn pressure off.
And while that often sounds like good training, in this case it worked against us.
Because she didn’t learn “avoid this.”
She learned, “I can tolerate this… and it will end… and if I push through long enough, I can still get what I want first.”
This is a dog bred to tolerate discomfort.
Bred to persist.
Bred to work through adversity.
So when the moment mattered, she didn’t avoid the sensation, she overrode it.
That forced me to confront something uncomfortable as a trainer: what people often refer to as “single-event learning” is rarely a single event at all. Prior conditioning can actually remove the possibility of true avoidance learning, because the dog has already learned that discomfort is survivable and that persistence can pay.
Here’s the part that really stopped me in my tracks.
If I remove myself from the equation, on a set up scenario, if I’m not present, she will completely avoid the cat.
Why?
Because its a surprise correction, which causing real aversion.
And that brings us back to biology.
When I’m not there, there’s no emotional driver pulling her through discomfort. Her nervous system does exactly what it’s designed to do: don’t go near that, it’s unpleasant.
When I am there, something changes.
Because I am highly reinforcing to her.
I carry emotional value.
I carry history.
I carry motivation.
So she is willing to ride through something unpleasant to stay connected to me not because she’s shut down, not because she’s afraid, and not because she’s broken, but because the value of the relationship outweighs the aversion in that moment
Some may wonder what this says about my relationship with my dog.
So let me be very clear.
Does my dog hate me? No.
Do I have a relationship with my dog? Absolutely.
And that is exactly the point.
Because I have a relationship with her, she can cope with experiences that might otherwise shatter a dog. She doesn’t disengage, collapse, or avoid me. She doesn’t fear the collar. She isn’t fearful around the cat.
But and this matters that does not mean I’ve arrived at where I want to be with her in this situation.
I haven’t.
I’ve got parts of it wrong.
And this is where I want to touch on the stigma around the e-collar.
Somewhere along the line, the e-collar became the damaging tool as if it exists outside of biology, learning history, emotion, and relationship.
Yes, it can be damaging.
So can many things.
So can pressure.
So can avoidance.
So can repetition.
So can poor timing.
So can misunderstanding how learning actually works.
No tool exists in isolation.
The real point of this conversation isn’t about defending or condemning an e-collar. It’s about understanding how dogs are biologically designed to function.
They move toward what feels good.
They avoid what feels unpleasant.
And they will override that avoidance only when something emotionally meaningful pulls them through it.
That isn’t ideology.
That’s biology.
I’m not sharing this because I have clean answers or perfect outcomes. I’m sharing it because real-life training is messy, layered, and humbling, especially when you’re honest about your own journey.
