12/31/2025
On Conflict, Control, and Why Management Fails Before Dogs Do
If you’re dealing with conflict and there is no way to mitigate that conflict, it will grow in intensity. That isn’t a dog-training problem. That’s a systems problem.
When people hear the word conflict, they imagine chaos, aggression, or failure. In reality, conflict exists on a spectrum—and misunderstanding where you are on that spectrum is what gets people hurt.
There are levels of conflict.
At the lowest level, you have disagreement with reciprocity intact. Two parties can be upset, but information still flows both ways. Arousal remains low enough for learning. This is functional. It’s where communication works.
At the next level, conflict becomes irreconcilable—not because it’s loud, but because it’s suppressed. One individual may be “holding it together,” while resentment, disgust, or contempt quietly accumulates. To the outside observer, everything looks fine. Then it isn’t. Explosions don’t come out of nowhere; they come from pressure that was never released or managed.
Dogs are no different.
Where people go wrong is assuming all conflict comes from the same place. It doesn’t. States matter. Fear, rage, and pleasure are not interchangeable—and they should not be handled the same way.
Let’s start with the one people are least comfortable acknowledging: pleasure.
In humans, we might label this darkly—sadism, cruelty, malice. In dogs, it’s simpler and more uncomfortable: enjoyment. Some dogs find conflict reinforcing. Winning works. Engagement works. The behavior itself becomes the reward.
When conflict is pleasure-driven, introducing punishment alone doesn’t remove the desire. It often does the opposite. It adds handler–dog conflict on top of an already reinforcing behavior, creating resentment, suppression, and eventual escalation. You haven’t changed the state—you’ve just layered fear or confusion onto it.
This is where people misunderstand control.
Control is not about hurting the dog. It’s about removing the weapon.
If you’re plunged into a war zone, you adapt, assault, and control. That doesn’t mean indiscriminate violence; it means denying access to tools that allow chaos to continue. A dog with strong desire and full access to teeth, space, and opportunity will be controlled by those tools if you don’t intervene.
Management—muzzles, back-ties, leashes—is not punishment here. It’s state regulation.
When you remove the outcome, you stress the system. You make the desire stop paying. Over time, the state fatigues.
This isn’t arbitrary, and it isn’t quick. The time component matters. Extended duration—often around 30 days—is required to recalibrate expectation and arousal. This aligns with what Anna Lembke outlines in Dopamine Nation: systems driven by reward don’t reset through single events, but through sustained absence of payoff.
Fear-based conflict is different.
With fear, the goal is safety and clarity. We muzzle-train and allow freedom. If you’re afraid of a dog wearing a muzzle, then this isn’t the stage you should be participating in. Fear needs predictability, not constant interruption. When the dog’s behavior no longer produces the feared outcome, confusion resolves and arousal drops—again, over time.
Rage is different still.
Rage requires expression without reinforcement. This is where back-tie work becomes valuable. A back-tie allows full expression of the state with no reaction from us. No feedback loop. No opposition. It does not function the same way as a fence or barrier, which often increases frustration by presenting something to fight against. The dog isn’t battling you; it’s encountering reality without payoff.
Throughout all of this, the technique is secondary. Tools change based on state. Fixating on methods misses the point entirely.
The real work is patience and observation—mostly from the human. Dogs in high arousal are confused when their behavior no longer creates the desired effect. People often quit right here, mistaking confusion for failure, and reintroduce freedom too early. That’s how conflict resurges.
To borrow from Friedrich Nietzsche, we often “punish people for their virtues, not their wrongs.” In dogs, that virtue might be intensity, persistence, or drive. The goal isn’t to crush it. The goal is to restructure the environment so those traits stop leading to damage.
When management fails, it’s rarely because the dog didn’t understand. It’s because the system wasn’t held long enough for the state to change.
Conflict doesn’t resolve through hope.
It resolves through structure.
And structure, when applied correctly, is not cruelty—it’s clarity.
