30/09/2024
I teach animals to do things, and I teach people how to teach their animals.
At one point I called myself a dog trainer, which, frankly, was never more than partially accurate, because the first animals I trained, long before I even had dogs, were turtles, birds and cats. But the dog training world is something contentious in ways that make me really uncomfortable and do not feel accurate to me, who I am or what I do. The rift between force free and balanced trainers, the need to label and identify as one or the other, the efforts each camp goes to to discredit the other all have nothing to do with any world I want to be a part of.
Animals are intimately entangled in every aspect of my life. Among my earliest memories is being in a stable, the smell of horses and leather, my sister being hoisted onto a mount as I watched and tripped over a small dog who bit me in the thigh. I was perhaps three?
My father tamed the squirrels outside, they would come through the window when he called them and sit on his lap, take a nut or other delicacy. Then we moved to NYC and showed me how to befriend the birds in the park, and on our fire escape. And later, when I was five or six, he helped me tame my box turtle.
No matter, those are just memories. A childhood paved seamlessly into a life of teaching animals and learning from them.
Back in the dark ages they would tell us over and over again that dogs were not people in fur suits. That somehow the ways we had of loving and respecting and treating each other were of no use when faced with these other creatures. And yet…
How do we treat people? How should we treat people? By learning who they are. By respecting their needs. By showing them love and affection. I raised two children moderately successfully by treating them the way I treated my dogs. I paid attention to who they were. I respected their needs. I showed them how to perform the skills they would need to succeed in the world they were growing into. I feel as though I did well as a mother. Do we ever really know how well we did? It would be unfathomable to ask our children whether we were good parents, such as manipulative question.
How should we raise dogs? By learning who they are. By respecting their needs. By showing them love and affection.
We can talk about science and ethics and tools forever. These are valid things to think about. Not fight about. Each family has different ways of doing and being, and dogs are family. It’s OK to do things in ways that fit within the framework of who you are.
(also enjoy some pictures of the heathens playing in the yard)
