Episode 20 - Finding the “Best” Trainer for Your Puppy Should Not Be Your First Priority

7/1/2024

This week’s topic is the significance of trainer certifications:‌

“Will knowing a trainer’s certification help you find the “Best” trainer?”

In this episode, I discuss:

The significance of different training certifications
Why finding the “best” trainer should not be your first priority
Why puppy class is fantastic, but not a requirement

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To read the transcript for this episode, click the link below.

EPISODE 20 - TRANSCRIPT

I'm Jane Messineo Lindquist and this is a Puppy Culture potluck podcast. You bring the topics, we bring the conversation.

Oh, look at that. Today's question is one that I wrote into the Puppy Culture discussion group. By way of background, I'm doing a booklet to help puppy owners find a safe puppy class, an appropriate puppy class for their puppies.

And this was my question.

Tell me what your bottom four or five dog trainer certification programs are. More than five, if you feel it's important. What would be the ones that raise an immediate red flag for you when you see them after a trainer's name? I'm trying to help puppy owners steer clear of bad trainers. I know the good certification programs. It's the bad ones that I really don't pay attention to.

So this generated a lot of interesting conversation. A lot of people did answer the question. But, you know, a lot of people gave some pushback about it, saying, well, you know, you can’t identify a good or a bad dog trainer by their certification, and I agree with that to an extent that probably what I should have said was, I'm looking for safe versus unsafe for puppies and I'm going to expound on that.

Let's start with the proposition. And the proposition is that while I'm not going to wade into the debate on different methods of dog training or using aversives as an adult dog or balance training or any of that other stuff, I'm just you know, when it comes to adult dogs, I'm not even going there. But I'm going to say unequivocally, there is never any reason to use an aversive on a puppy.

Puppies are the equivalent of nursery school aged children. You would never hit a three year old and you would run from anybody who suggested that you do that. And the same should be true for your puppy. I'm extremely interested in the science in this area and any new studies that come out, and I'm not an ideologue when it comes to training methods at all.

But every study that I am aware of, and there are a number of them, there's Megan Heron study, there's a number of studies about dogs trained with positive reinforcement versus aversive. There's the studies about puppies being scared in the first year of life and how that can have a detrimental outcome for them in terms of both dog and human aggression and how an aversive training method is probably the most likely way a puppy, a young puppy is going to be scared or have a negative experience.

And zero studies that show any benefit, any upside at all to using punishment and aversives on a puppy. There's two main arguments that people bring up on this subject. Number one, that it's natural that the mother will use aversives on the puppy, that the mother will quote correct, unquote, the puppy.

And that also is wrong. Maybe from an evolutionary point of view it's advantageous to the mother to sometime use aversive or punishment on her puppies to resource guard from her puppies, to be defensive about weaning the puppies. Because remember, from an evolutionary point of view, her primary game is to breed again, produce more. If those puppies don't actually need to nurse from her anymore or need to eat the food that she's eating, she really doesn't care if the puppies are damaged emotionally.

I mean, it's a pretty simple equation, right? Natural is not always best. And indeed, as we mentioned in Puppy Culture, this has been studied and damns who use confrontational methods to wean their puppies, in fact, those puppies do turn out to have more social handicaps. They're more socially inhibited, they're less outgoing, they're more fearful. And then the dams that use non-confrontational retreat or just not snapping and pinning and growling at them, those puppies grow up to be more confident, more outgoing, more likely to play with humans.

So, you know, yes, it's natural, but you have to ask what nature's game is. And nature's game is not the individual puppy. You know, nature doesn't care about the individual puppy. Nature cares about survival of the species. We as breeders care about individual puppies. We as puppy owners care about individual puppies.

So I'm just going to knock that argument right out of the box because it's just, it's true, maybe in some senses that in the wild the puppies would experience some degree of aversives in nature. But, you know, a lot of puppies are going to die and a lot of puppies are going to be psychologically not what we think is optimal for us. Again, as Suzanne Shelton is always saying, there's nothing natural about dog breeding and domestic dogs.

Okay? We're not looking for a natural outcome. We're looking for an optimal outcome for us. And what we want is not natural. We want a friendly dog that is outgoing and happy. And, you know, that's that's just not what nature, nature provides suspicion, suspicion and fear are the things that keep dogs alive in nature. So. All right, cross that one off.

Then the other argument that people used was, well, you know, it's wrong to give puppy owners a list of certifications and say these are good ones and these are bad ones because a certification doesn't indicate which trainer is a good trainer. That there are some quote unquote, balanced trainers who will do a much better job with puppies than pure positive trainers.

And, you know, I can't argue with that. I don't disagree with that. Certainly some of my top dog training mentors have not been above dipping into all four quadrants. I mean, certainly they've used some suppression on dogs at times. And I've done seminars all over the world and frankly been aghast at how lacking in basic training, mechanical skills, a lot of pure positive trainers are. Just an inability to slice and dice and shape behaviors, which a lot of these balance trainers are a lot better at that.

So while that's true that this is not, you know, separating trainers by certification is not going to identify the better trainers, what it is going to do and this is what's important to me as a breeder is it's going to identify why the trainers who are ethically bound not to use aversives and punishment on puppies. And it's going to separate those trainers from the trainers who are highly skilled and trained in using aversive methods. A trainer that is highly skilled and trained in using a pinch collar, a shock collar or any kind of other aversive, has that in their toolkit? Okay, It's a possibility. It's on the table. And if they're really good at it, it's probably something they're going to reach for. You can argue with me, but I'm going to tell you I never, ever want to hear that that was used on any puppy of mine because it's wrong.

So I'm not saying that this is going to help people find the greatest trainer in the world, but it's going to keep puppy owners safe. It's going to keep them in a place. If you go with a pet professional guild trainer, I mean, they take an ethical oath that they're not going to use any aversives.

So as a dog breeder, when I send my puppy owners out and listen, I do partner with my puppy owners, okay? I help them find trainers. That's one of the things that we work on before I place the puppy. We've selected a trainer for them, but even so, sometimes the puppy owners will take it upon themselves or they'll go to a trainer and they can't get in the class and they see another trainer and they think like, Oh, this is this is okay. They don't understand what's going on.

And again, as a breeder, I feel like I'm just sending my puppy owners out into literally a minefield that like that, there's no way they're going to be able to negotiate this. There just isn't. So making it very black and white. Okay. And saying these trainers, you'll be safe with these trainers, not that they're going to be the best trainers in the world, but they're not going to do an alpha role or a scruff or put a pinch collar on your dog or a shock collar on your dog, traumatize your puppy and basically send you to behavior modification boot camp for the rest of your life with that dog

That, none of that's going to happen. If you go to a pet professional guild trainer. They may stink. They may not successfully teach your puppy how to lie down or walk on leash, but who cares? I don't care. There's so many resources online. We've got our own puppy course, With Open Arms and a Level Head puppy course. I teach you how to teach your dog to do anything.

It's not rocket science, okay? There's a lot of really competent, positive trainers. It's not hard to find one. So again, if you happen to hit on a bad positive trainer, the worst thing that happens is your dog doesn't get trained. If you hit on a bad trainer that uses aversives and punishment on your puppy, your puppy can be just messed up for life, quite frankly.

It only takes one traumatic experience for a young puppy to be traumatized for the rest of its life. Why would you take that risk? I am a huge proponent of puppy class and without a doubt, when you can get into a good puppy class, it's a gift. But you know what? A good puppy class is not a requirement.

It's a luxury. And frankly, training is way overrated. The important thing about puppy class is more that the puppy just learns to do some kind of training activity in public. Okay. It's just the concept that we were here. We focus on our owners. There's these other puppies. I'm experiencing all this stuff, the ramping up, the ramping down, the entry, the exit, all that sort of stuff is important.

But the real meat of it, like how well your puppy is trained at the end, I mean, it doesn't really matter. The best dog I ever had. You all know her, Daphne. The best dog did not know how to lie down. Yeah, I know. Dirty secret. My dog did not know how to lie down. I mean, eventually I did train her because we, we needed a rally title for our Versatility awards when she was like eight years old I'm like, alright, I guess I need to train this dog now. But, you know, training, she she, she knew how to walk on leash, basically, I did trainer in agility some but she didn't know how to lie down. It didn't not affect my enjoyment of that dog the most challenging and frankly unpleasant dog to live with that I ever had was Ruby, who, by the way, was ranked nationally in APDT rally.

The APDT doesn't do rally anymore, but in the day they were the first ones. I think if not one of the first ones, the first ones to do rally. And she was top five in the country. Top five in the country. But oh my gosh, what a terrible dog to live with. She actually enjoyed disliking other dogs. She was so dog aggressive and, you know, a lot of the reason why I'm the dog trainer I am today is because I just had to train that dog to within an inch of her life in order for her to interface successfully in public.

And frankly, around the house, she was, I would say, indifferent to people. I mean, she would like people if she felt she had a use for you at that moment, but she wasn't, you know, warm and fuzzy kind of dog. I loved her dearly, dearly, and did not take away from my love for the dog. But she was a terrible dog to live with. I'm just going to say it, but very well trained.

My point here is Ruby, you know, I got at four and a half months old, Daphne I raised from birth. Is that the big difference between those two dogs? I mean, I think a lot is genetic, but I think a lot really did have to do with Ruby, you know, having had a different set of hands raising her in the beginning.

So I guess what I'm saying to you is that how you teach something is much more important than what you teach. And you can live very happily with an untrained dog. So don't feel that if you can't find a safe dog trainer that you have to run to a bad training class, or that you should really look at balanced trainers for your puppy because you know, they may be able to get you better results because the result you're looking for is that you have a dog that's a pleasure to live with and not a behavioral project.

And the people that are going to be able to most reliably deliver that to you are the people who are not going to use aversives and punishment on your dog.

If you liked this podcast, you'll love our Puppy owner course available at madcapuniversity.com. If you're a breeder, check out our breeder course also available at madcapuniversity.com.

Breeders, if you want to get your puppy owners started the right way, check out our bulk discounts for multiple copies of our puppy course at puppyculture.com.

Well that's it for this time. Thanks for listening. Bye bye.