I'm pretty sure my dog would be more than happy to engage in the colonization of our neighborhood and the wholesale slaughter of the indigenous squirrels absent any imposition from me.
On the internet, everything is polarized — even dog training. How did the culture wars come for dogs?
This New York Times podcast initially caught my interest, as the notion of dog culture wars had me pondering the canine etiquette of pooping (in the middle of the road or the more private environs of your neighbor's flower garden) and the manner in which the me-too movement has affected the long-held social norms of sniffing private parts.
Much to my disappointment, this was an unfortunate misinterpretation of the subject matter.
This was about how, as the blurb attests, "everything is polarized." Alicia P.Q. Wittmeyer, who created the piece and works as an opinion editor for the New York Times, notes - without a hint of self awareness - that The Times, along with the rest of the establishment media that serve as organs of propaganda for the progressive left, bear most of the responsibility for this polarization.
The accusation that conservatives foment the culture war has long been a case of painfully obvious projection. Conservatives have always been on defense, reacting to progressives' eagerness to overturn centuries, if not millennia (gender identity anyone?), of social norms and then, going full Captain Renault, are all shocked! Shocked to find that a culture war is going on in here.
Still, I credit Wittmeyer for recognizing her own potential biases in this podcast, which was actually an abbreviated and repurposed version of a much longer but very similar piece she wrote for The Times in December.
In both pieces, she details the growing fault lines, both political and cultural, between "positive reinforcement training" and "balanced training."
In short, positive reinforcement training is purely reward-driven, usually treats, as most dogs are very much food motivated, but also other rewards such as praise, in order to provide positive reinforcement for desired behaviors. You sit when told, you get a treat or an excited "good boy!" As for discouraging unwanted behaviors, such as getting up on the couch, or biting your arm off, she says in her podcast that you just "manag[e] your dog so that it can't engage in behavior you don't like and just kind of ignoring it."
She had expanded on that a bit in her December piece:
Proponents of positive reinforcement training say you stop bad behavior through a combination of management measures (drawing the curtains for a dog that won't stop barking at passers-by) and reinforcing alternative behaviors you prefer (giving treats to reward moments of not barking).
Permit me to pause here for a moment. My interest in this is personal, and my experience is direct.
We have owned a series of rescue dogs for nearly 30 years. Our last dog, extremely chill and docile, responded just fine with this approach, largely because he had near zero aggression toward anything. He was an unusual case, and yet we still used a prong collar on him which I will go into later.
But for most dogs, such as our current one, the notion of pretending that bad behavior doesn't exist in dogs, which are instinctively, predators - one who shares your house and has the capacity to kill and maim on a moment's notice - is, I believe, irresponsible. Just because you draw the curtains doesn't mean your dog still doesn't want to disembowel your mail carrier. It would be like ignoring a lump and believing that means it doesn't exist.
More on this later, including my experiences of being a balanced training dog owner living in the deep-blue positive-reinforcement-training area of Washington, DC.
Wittmeyer begins her December piece with this.
If you own a dog and have ever searched the internet for advice on that dog, there's a good chance you've encountered Zak George.
This fascinated me. In a momentary act of madness, and despite my swearing that I would never do so, our family adopted a puppy last fall. He was a rescue about six months old, and badly in need of training, so I initially went searching on YouTube where Zak George is, as Wittmeyer points out, "the most popular dog trainer on the platform."
I've watched Mr. George's videos for years; ... I watched as he worked with untrained rescue dogs to prepare them for new homes. ... Every once in a while, there were hints that he had bigger things on his mind: his videos in which he said the dog training industry needed to confront its "misogyny," for instance.
Yeah, that's kind of a red flag. Strike that. That's a red flag surrounded by fireworks, a marching band, and a Blue Angels flyover.
But mostly his content consisted of him training his dogs: Inertia, a black and white Border collie, and Veronica, a rescue mutt with a cute underbite.
"Mostly."
Then, around this time last year, I watched, transfixed, as Mr. George began launching broadsides against an approach to training dogs known as balanced training (more on just what that is in a moment). In video after video, he declared that the dog training industry had reached a crisis point and that it was time for a reckoning with those in the profession who train with what are called aversives — tools that cause a dog discomfort.
Here is the video she refers to:
I want to challenge us all, myself included, to feel a little bit uncomfortable in this conversation.
This is usually the point where I walk away because you know this is not going to be a discussion, and George has no interest in feeling a "little bit uncomfortable." This is going to be a lecture about making you feel uncomfortable. His over-the-top effort ensuring viewers that he wants to be inclusive and respectful, and that he is interested in hearing others thoughts, are spoken in the manner of an adult patiently speaking to a child. He also refers to "science," studies," and "data" so much that I started to wonder if he suffered from Tourette Syndrome.
Wittmeyer notes:
The videos did what they were intended to do: They sparked a response.
Yes, they did.
But not just any response. Comment sections filled with discussions on "woke idiots" in dog training. "Radicals Are Hijacking Dog Training," posted one trainer, calling force-free training, the anti-aversive [anti-punishment] movement of which Mr. George is arguably the most prominent face, an "ideology" and a "cult" with a "radicalized agenda" — language that sounded awfully familiar.
To her credit, given she writes for The Times, she noted the leftist responses as well.
Even before this, I'd seen the occasional Instagram post by a trainer using terminology that seemed drawn from another context: I'd paused on several posts that applied the term "consent" to dogs — as in, we should get their consent before we pet them.
In some cases, the trainer's vocabulary seemed drawn from even more distant shores: "I will not project colonial, capitalist, or patriarchal concepts on my dog," one post read, in between tips on leash reactivity and separation anxiety; "don't gaslight your dog," another urged.
I couldn't resist clicking through the colonial one, part of an Instagram post by #calmcanineacademy.
It was part of a scroll-through exercise of "Sensitive Dog Affirmations" which included this choice.
(There are a lot of damaged people in this world.)
They created a post about having been quoted in Wittmeyer's piece, which elicited a number of comments, including this one:
It can be extremely challenging for those still stuck in the colonial mindset to see how colonialism affects everything and everyone (yes including how we treat or teach our dogs). It's one thing to call our dogs family but to treat them like they're more than property.!? — articles like these prove that there's still a ways to go to get there.
An article by an author surprised at the growing politicization of dog training is clearly an ideal opportunity to engage in a Maoist struggle session!
I wanted to be thorough, so I watched the whole thirty-three minutes and thirty-seven seconds of Zak George's video. It's incredibly repetitive, so there really wasn't much to it, however his main arguments repeated ad nauseam are that the use of aversive tactics in balanced training are both unnecessary and counterproductive
To the latter point, he notes that B.F. Skinner, the famed animal behavioral researcher determined that there were considerable negative side effects of using punishment such as,
... increased aggression, decreased motivation, lower self-esteem, and even decreased compliance when using these physical punishments in his experiments.
He mentions these negative outcomes frequently, citing this and that study.
And yet, I'm not sure how that squares with peoples' actual experience. Surely, balanced training methods which use both would not exist if it routinely produced those results. Dog trainers are expensive, and people are not going to continue paying good money for bad outcomes.
Well, except for Washington Commanders fans.
There are trainers who will just, you know, default from day one to using tools on dogs like choke chains, prong, electric collars ...
He spits these terms out, in that exact order, multiple times, usually as "choke chains, prong collars, and e-collars."
Oh my!
These are part of a grab bag of aversive methods of which he disapproves, completely, as in they have no place in modern dog training at all.
Interestingly, he and other self-congratulatory positive trainers do not appear to oppose the use of a leash and collar which are, while mild, still aversive in that the dog wants to roam about as he or she pleases, but is being prevented from doing so by what amounts to a noose.
Perhaps they are not quite as pure in thought and deed as they like to think, and rather than being a superior being of elevated thought, just land in a different spot on the spectrum of acceptable aversives like the rest of us.
No matter, he is on a mission and all his protestations throughout the video about not questioning other trainers' "love and dedication to making dogs' lives better," and genuinely wanting a discussion, is belied by his later behavior.
Wittmeyer spoke with George last September.
At the time we were speaking, Mr. George's war against balanced training had taken a notable twist: He was now leading what could only be described as a full-fledged cancellation campaign against another dog trainer — a particularly egregious one, whose tactics some balanced trainers disparaged, too.
It always starts with the "particularly egregious" ones. Always. One day it's Hitler-saluting Nazis supporting the extermination of the Jews.
Next, it's MAGA supporters suggesting that maybe it would be a good idea for a country to have a border.
This certainly felt like an escalation. Mr. George was calling for his followers to show up and protest at this trainer's events, to contact venues that host him and leave them bad reviews; he was tagging institutions and other prominent dog trainers, urging them to issue statements.
So much for other trainers' love and dedication to making dogs' lives better.
Between mid-August, when he started the campaign, and mid-September, when we spoke, he had posted on Instagram dozens of times. A vast majority of those posts had been about this trainer.
Mr. George's commitment to force-free dog training is deeply held and, again, undeniably sincere.
There is nothing more dangerous than the sincere tyrant.
At the same time, the campaign seemed perfectly calibrated to validate the perspectives of those who previously sounded hysterical and overwrought. In other words, it looked like a woke dog-training mob, after all.
While Wittmeyer occasionally veers off into the absurd ...
Of course, it would be silly to say that dogs can't be political: Anyone who has seen photos of German shepherds at civil rights marches should appreciate that they can.
... there is very little of that. Wittmeyer just might be that rare editor, of the opinion section of all things, who is willing to examine her own biases.
In her podcast, in which she focuses on her training travails with her own dog, she is fully willing to concede that she is as subject to these cultural and political forces (and their rapid convergence) as anyone.
So I thought that I was absorbing all of this on an intellectual level, that I was just sort of cool and analytical about the world of online dog training. But looking back, I think that it actually was affecting me in ways that I didn't fully appreciate at the time. And I say that because we spent a while thinking about the question of the e-collar. And we never went forward with it.
How often do you see this kind of introspection in mainstream media, and in The Times no less? She is by no means perfect, no one is, but perhaps there is hope for the profession, if only a glimmer.
What I came to realize is that the reasons why I felt conflicted about whether or not to use an e-collar, it wasn't just about questions of how I want to train my dog. It was also that the e-collar had kind of become this contentious object within the dog training culture wars. But I think that there was an element of what would people think about us. Would I feel like I have to explain why I have an e-collar? Would I just feel like this was something that I'm not the kind of person to use this kind of tool?
Which brings me to my own experiences and why the political divide makes a great deal of sense to me as I am living in it.
As I had mentioned earlier, we got a puppy last fall in need of training. He was pulling horribly in a harness I had gotten (I couldn't find the prong collar we had) which made him difficult to control, as he was incredibly strong for being 50 pounds. The martingale collar was worse in that he still pulled, and was basically choking himself to death. We needed training fast, and initially signed up for treat- and clicker-based positive training which had an appointment a couple weeks out, the soonest one we could find.
I've not had good experiences with that kind of training, basically George-approved training, so we kept looking.
The trainer we came across I liked right away, as he insisted on using a prong collar.
He told us he could solve our pulling problem in 20 minutes.
He did.
The trainer was funny in that beyond his insistence on using a prong collar (that was his deal killer) I could tell he was tip-toeing around us a bit. Finally, at one point while we were working on long-leash training he was trying to articulate why strong corrections (a serious yank on the collar) were sometimes necessary, and was clearly choosing his words very carefully when I interrupted him.
"Because he's an animal," I said.
"Thank you," he said, punctuating the air with a hand gesture as an obvious wave of relief came over his face.
He went on to say that I wouldn't believe what he has to deal with with "the Old Town ladies" (Old Town being downtown Alexandria, a few minutes to my south) who treat their dogs like children.
I knew exactly what he meant.
In fact, that's why I understand the political divide.
Progressives tend to engage in magical thinking, conjuring up a world that only exists in their imagination. They want to see dogs as four-legged humans and believe they can be reasoned with. They believe violence of any kind is never necessary, and can get away with that make-believe only because others (military, police, corrections officers, etc.) commit violence on their behalf.
But, most of all, they need to be seen as virtuous. This is the God-shaped hole I've spoken of from time to time. They need something to believe in, some moral order, and what they believe in is themselves and the moral order is that of their own virtue.
Our dogs have always been family. They are loved and cared for and protected from themselves. The new puppy sleeps with my son at night.
But I never lose sight of my responsibility as a human being. I don't correct my dog because I don't love him.
I correct him because I do.
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