Give Me 16 Minutes And I'll Stop You Wasting 3 Years Of Your Dog's Life.

Right. I might regret this, but here goes. Here's why force-free dog training doesn't work, has never worked, and will never work. The thing is, the people that do say it works, let me be very clear, they're playing a completely different game than those of us who actually solves problems. I'm going to walk you through all the reasons why logically any Reasonable person would see that this approach falls apart and has a ceiling. And yeah, I'm gonna put my neck on the line here, and I will get backlash from this video, but frankly, I'm sick and tired of the virtue signaling I am seeing from so many dog trainers, because that's what it is. Before we get on to the, the reasons as to why it won't work, let me just start with this. Those who say force-free dog training works, they have a very different set of goalposts from those of us who provide solutions. So So what do I mean by that? I occasionally consult and mentor other dog trainers. I help them run their businesses and essentially like teach them how to train their dogs. And every now and then I'll have a force-free dog trainer come to me seeking for help. And so I always go and have a look at their reviews online because of, you know, any good business is substantiated only by the results that it gets for people, right? And I never see any bad reviews. There's literally never any bad ones. But there's never any great ones either. There's never like any life-changing reviews. I call them 1.5-star reviews. Yeah, they did literally leave 5 stars, but when you actually read the message they put, it'll say things like, "We feel better equipped now to deal with Fido's problems." "Stephanie explained the technique so well. We now have a better understanding of why our dog does what it does." Notice how no one is talking about actual tangible solutions. No one's saying, They changed my life. My dog will come back when he's called at the beach and they'll, they've stopped barking at other dogs. They just say things like, I feel better equipped to deal with Fido's behavior. We're on the right track. We're still a work in progress, but the trainer was very nice. There was actually a force-free dog trainer recently who came at me online and I went and had a nosy, you know, guilty at their reviews. And there was a lot of them. There was like hundreds of them to be fair. But you know what they did? They fitted harnesses for puppies, and all the reviews were like, great fit for my puppy's harness. And this trainer was boasting about having like all these reviews, and, um, I was like, where are the actual dog training reviews? And they didn't really have any. The occasional one they kind of did was the same old nonsense. Anyway, here's my point: the goals are very different. If the standard is that low, if the bar is all the way down here, of course it can work, because the goal you've set to achieve is nothing other than telling the owner that their behavioral issues aren't their fault. And over time they're gonna go away, which just maybe is gonna take months or years or whatever nonsense they're spooning to these people. By the way, it'll never work. Their idea of a positive result is to make the owner feel better about their dog's problems. And I don't mean the reactivity's gonna stop. I mean, it's not gonna have a chance to react 'cause you're hiding it from dogs. Of course it's gonna stop the reactivity, but You know, and I've talked about this in previous videos, it's going to come back with a vengeance. And they deem that as a result. Think of it like this. Imagine you hire a mechanic to fix your car's engine so you can drive it again. And I'm sorry to use an inhuman example here, but hopefully it'll help you understand. And they say something like, I can't fix it, but I'll help you understand why it's broken and you'll feel better about it. That's not fixing the car. That's a therapy session. And your car still doesn't fucking work. Okay, so let's get into the real reasons why it doesn't work, and I'm gonna start with the big one but finish with the most obvious one, the one that goes right under people's noses. We all understand the concept of the hedonic treadmill, where we seek pleasure, and once we attain that pleasure, it becomes almost the new baseline of pleasure, and then we continue to pursue greater forms of pleasure, which leads to a very unhappy life because there are ceilings. So like, what do you do after you get the brand new Lamborghini? Where do you go then? You, you inevitably, you hit a ceiling. And as crazy as it sounds, the same things happens with training dogs. If we only train them with positive reinforcement and pleasure, the attainment of food and toys, without any sort of consequence or obligation, the high-value rewards we're using to capture these important behaviors and desensitize our dogs become the new baseline. So imagine you're a kid and your parents give you $100 every time you do your homework. At first you're excited, but after a few weeks, $100 is normal. Now to get you to do something harder, like clean the whole house, they need to give you $200, then $300, and eventually they run out of money and you hit a ceiling. And when they can only offer you $100 again, you're like, mm, nah, it's not worth it anymore. And that's exactly what happens with dogs if you're using constant high-value rewards, an absolute mountain of treats, just to start your training journey and do the most basic stuff like look at me when we're outside, and we're using rewards on top of the dog's daily food. What happens when we need that progression? What happens when the task gets harder, which it should be if you're trying to make things better for our dog? What happens when we need to increase the intensity of the feedback? If we're limited to rewards, we're going to fall short. All we've done is make the great thing baseline. The old good thing is now actually bad, and this cycle continues until we very quickly hit a ceiling. We might see some progress in the first instance, and we get this false belief, oh, it's working, but we hit that ceiling and the threshold very quickly when our dog prefers to kick off at other dogs rather than receive the baseline reward. In this instance where we've continually attempted to chase our tail, what happens? We fall short. We hit that threshold, and you'll get results where your dog will be good until, you know, like 25 meters away or 50 meters away or like 10 meters away. You could potentially close down that threshold, but you will hit a ceiling, and you'll be given these false beliefs from these trainers. It works because if we've seen it work in a very limited instance at the very beginning of the journey, and then progress stalls. That's reason one, number one, perhaps the biggest one, which again is kind of tied into reason number 2, which is less obvious but just as important. For good training to work, we must limit the rehearsal of the behavior we're trying to see go away. We must limit our dog's reactivity to that behavior. Essentially, every time they do it, the behavior is going to get worse and it contributes to the likelihood of it happening again next time. Now, if you don't know, Behaviors that are intermittently reinforced or intermittently get the opportunity to be expressed are more highly reinforced. And I've done videos on this before, but a behavior that is allowed to occasionally happen, it has like this jackpot effect, the same effect you would get gambling at a casino. That behavior gets stronger. Think about a slot machine. You pull the lever 50 times and you lose every single time, but on the 51st pull, you win 20. What, what do you do? You get super excited and you keep pulling pulling that lever, hoping for another win. And that one win made the action of pulling the lever, the behavior of pulling the lever, incredibly strong. Even though you've lost 50 times, that's the one that keeps you hooked. The whole premise of force-free dog training is that we keep the dog under threshold. We keep the dog at a distance where they don't want to react. That's fine. We condition alternate behaviors, and if our dog looks like they're going to react, we want to divert them in some way to ensure that they don't. And I I actually buy into that. I don't have a problem with that. That makes sense, and I also do that. However, what happens when we lose control of the environment, which is inevitable if we want to start practicing in the real world and take our dog out? We don't have control of the real world, which is unfortunate but true. So we're walking down the street with our reactive dog, we're keeping them at a distance from other dogs. We could even be in like an open field where we can see for miles and everything is going great. But then a dog comes around the corner 10 feet away, or a dog runs 100 feet to come and say hello to our dog. And in that moment, we have no ability to dictate space between our dog and their trigger. And what's likely gonna happen is our dog is going to go over threshold completely outside of our control. And if we're using a methodology that doesn't allow us to stop that reaction, our dog's going to react, and all we've developed is an intermittent reaction. Sometimes they're allowed to react, sometimes they're not. And chances are the other dog is going to go away. The distance is going to be created and our dog is going to achieve the function of the behavior. And they're going to go, ah, it still works. I shouldn't give up on this behavior. Personally, I would come in at that point and do the same as a force-free dog trainer. But I would also punish the dog in the moment they try to react to say, hey, that is no longer an option. But look at all the other options you do have. He's just working through a couple of things with other dogs. So, hey, I don't want him to like bark and then the other dog go away and he, he never gets used to them then, you see. Is that all right? Cool. Thanks so much. Yes, cool. Thanks a lot, mate. Really appreciate that. With the force-free plan, the behavior is gonna actually get worse, not better, because it's now intermittently allowed to happen and become exceptionally novel. The behavior is going to become stronger. So this brings me to the last reason why it, it doesn't work typically, and it's less obvious. However, it's perhaps the most important. I'm not sure. So let's say it does work, which we now know is very likely it doesn't. These are just 3 reasons out of probably 100. If you want me to do a video where I come up with 100 reasons, I'll do it. But the final reason it doesn't work: we train people to train their dogs. People are not willing to waste months and potentially years of their dog's life to find the solution that they're after. Let me be very clear here. They don't want to. And I will say this until I'm blue in the face. A methodology is only as good as the subject's willingness to apply it. You, as the dog owner, are the subject. If you tell someone it's going to take 6 months to a year to combat their dog's behavioral issues, they're going to say, screw that. I'll go find the guy who promises he can do it in an hour. And by the way, that's unethical too. You're not going to fix a problem in an hour without absolutely fucking crushing your dog's spirit. So let me just Be clear there. But I can preach as much as I want that force-free dog training works. For the sake of this example, let's say it does. It's very likely if it did to take an exceptionally long amount of time, which isn't going to get the average person to buy in, and therefore it becomes redundant. That's ignoring the first two reasons I gave you as to why it won't work. More importantly, a method that is not going to be put into practice because it is not highly believable because we don't have the owner buy in will never be done. If they don't believe, it won't happen. If someone said to me, you can get in shape, but it's gonna take you 3 years just to get rid of your belly fat, I'd be like, screw it, I'm gonna just stay fat. I'm gonna keep eating donuts, and I'm gonna keep my fucking love handles. I just don't have it in me to waste that amount of time of my life. I'd just rather eat the donuts. This is essentially what's happening when these force-free dog trainers are taking years and months and months. The reason we use consequences is to make the process happen in a time frame that is going to get buy-in from that owner. And this is exceptionally important to understand. And further to that, I'm still waiting for compelling evidence that it does work. Everyone has a smartphone nowadays. Everyone can record their dog training results. We have quite literally hundreds of testimonials and case studies recorded on our website. On our web pages, on our social media, and I mean hundreds. It's quite easy to pull out your phone and just film. For those trainers who are saying, oh well, I'm concentrating more on the clients and delivering results than I am like looking for footage. Well, firstly, you don't have the results in the first instance anyway. Secondly, maybe more people would start believing you if you just documented the process. Getting people to buy in is part of people following the method. It's part of the method. If you gave actual compelling evidence that this stuff works, you would help more dogs by your own logic. But unfortunately, I don't believe you can do it. I don't think you don't film because you're trying to give your clients anonymity. I don't think it's because you need both hands to coach that particular person and therefore can't bring out your smartphone. A good dog trainer should be making decent money. You could probably afford someone to follow you around and do it for you anyway. And you might be thinking, Well, I just don't want the dog to rehearse the behavior for the sake of capturing a before video. I get that too. But the dog's done it 1,000 times. What's 1,001? Fair enough if it's something like resource guarding or like genuinely like aggression where someone might get hurt. I get that. Don't do that. But at the same time, the owner probably has some footage of the dog doing the thing you're trying to fix. So start showing us compelling evidence and maybe people will start believing you and applying it. But until then, people are gonna look for solution-based dog training that has proof of concept. If you don't have that, nothing's believable. Nothing's going to be achieved. And finally, I've said this a million times, the amount of force-free dog trainers I've had reach out to me personally to tell me they use an e-collar in private with their own dogs, but they're too scared of being outed by their own community is insane. It is insane. All these closeted dog trainers. If that's you and you're looking for someone to speak to, you can reach out to me. I'm not gonna out you. Don't worry. I get it, I understand how cannibalistic your own team can be, but there are a lot more of you than you think, and chances are one of your favorite force-free dog trainers is using tools. Anyway, that's my rant. Hopefully it'll save some of you a bunch of time. Really, the only agenda to this video is that you don't waste your time with one of these people who is just virtue signaling. Ultimately, they're using it as a marketing strategy, or they're truly indoctrinated and brainwashed themselves that they, they can't even see their hand in front of their face. If you're here, you want to join our community and align yourself with more like-minded dog owners. The link is in the description. It is free. From there, you can go on to do one of our paid programmes, or you can go in there and just enjoy the free stuff. That's what it's there for. See you later.