For those of you who follow Zak George I wrote about a while ago, so do you feel confident to Episode in his series of training puppies that got so incredibly much criticism. Both his followers and other professional dog trainers have commented on this particular clip – on both constructive and less constructive (read; quite aggressive manner).
If you do not can look through the clip which is about fifteen minutes long, it's about how Zak George takes his then about six month old BC puppy Inertia to a dog kennel for the first time. The purpose of it all is to train the environment and socialize her – outside the picnic area, but it ends with him taking her in anyway.
That which received so an enormous amount of criticism is in short two things; why can he not read his dog enough to understand that she was not ready to meet other dogs in the intense way that easily occurs in a rest yard, and why he did not make sure to interrupt the experience long before it escalated to what was happening. A big, black dog rushed towards Inertia in a very approachable and burdust way, whereupon Inertia nibbled at that dog a couple of times.
Zaks solution the problem was to lift Inertia and walk away. She then spent a lot of time hiding under a bench, still in the picnic area.
I am not a dog expert. On the other hand, I am very interested and relatively well-read. I have spent ten years learning to read and manage my own dog, which is certainly the exact opposite of Zak George's dog – but still. I have enough knowledge to see that this dog lacks what she needs most; a sensible leadership to lean on.
Eventually I come to the real point of this post, but first I want to infiltrate what I myself consider to be strange with this clip from Zak George.
In short can I say that this is me (and many others) considers hands with a dog where the human spends too much time training the dog and too little time being a sensible leader. My personal opinion is that it is completely insane to insist on training your puppy in every situation, when it is more than enough to act as a guide and in a way the dog understands to inform about what makes sense to do in different situations. In this way, the dog learns to be able to make its own decisions based on experience and a hopefully calm and stable energy level..
I can not in words express how completely crazy I think it is to think that this with training is the only thing that matters.
Then consider I also that it is more or less a disaster that a person who pretends to be a professional dog trainer does not have a better ability to interpret his own dog's body language and energy, and based on that make decisions that benefit her development.
To proceed; here in Sweden, a documentary about the dog behavior specialist Alexandra Ortega is currently being shown (Dogs of Pegasus). I've written about her before, and she belongs to a school that is the exact opposite of what is considered modern dog training today; positive reinforcement. Alexandra sees structure and order as a necessity to make a dog work, and she also believes that most dog problems do not start in the dog but in the person it lives with.
I follow Alexandra on Facebook, and the comments on her own posts are in principle exclusively positive. But I hear from others who are in other hundred-related groups that the comments about her are really hateful – and I can not for the life of me understand why.
What I can do understand is that you have different ways of looking at how to raise and handle a dog in a good and sensible way. I think that's all right – we are all different and work in different ways. Over time, I have come to realize that there are many ways to look at this with living with a dog. We expect different things from our dogs.
And that is now we come to some kind of point with this post.
While I å one side realizes, understands and accepts that there are different “schools” in how to live with your dogs, I have a very hard time understanding the total absence of acceptance and tolerance in so many people. It becomes almost necessary to bring out the pillow of shame – for real.
To write hateful and threatening comments on social media – who benefits from it? In what way is it constructive? In what way does it benefit your own attitude to dog life?
I am guessing that this is just one of many expressions of today's general attitude among people. But let me inform you that self-righteousness and self-glorification are among the ugliest qualities one can have. This belief that one's own beliefs are the right truth is a very nasty attitude. It is clear that one must get a conviction, but it is also very clothed to have understanding and accept that others do not have the same view of how things work.
And the fact is that it is not someone else's, in my eyes pucked opinions, which I think is most nasty. It is the total inability and unwillingness of some people to accept the opinions of others, theories and methods about how things work – including how to handle dogs (note that I wrote handles – do not exercise).