You and your dog are awesome, so building an equally rich, rewarding relationship is a matter of knowledge, skills and adhering to a few bedrock principles in all that you do with your dog.
We love our dogs and we want the absolute best for them. We bring dogs into our lives to make the world a better place both for us and for them, and the fact that you’re reading this on a dog training site right now means that you’re committed to doing everything you can on behalf of your dog.
When positive training was born dog trainers focused on the obvious: trying to get dogs either to do something we wanted them to do, or to stop doing something we didn’t want them to do. That was pretty much it, and while the methods trainers used to get those results varied, the goal was almost always the same: changing the dog’s behavior.
But here’s the thing about dog training: it’s changing. The more we learn about our dogs, about their needs, wants, emotional and cognitive lives, the more exciting and rich the world of dog training is becoming. And the more we understand, the faster, and better we can create harmonious lives with our dogs, lives that foster joy for both people and dogs together. In fact, we’ve learned that training is just one small piece of building a great life with a dog, and that many “training problems” are better solved with other tools, like enrichment, socialization, safety and wellness, and communication.
The Positively Pillars are built on a few key truths
Your dog is great. Yep, we know that for a fact, and we want you to know that and experience that, too, if you don’t already! And how can we be sure? As we said above, the more we learn about the exquisite sensitivities and abilities of our canine companions, the more we realize that dogs, every dog, is an extraordinary being. And the more we know about the species, the more we can see and react to individual differences between dogs, too. What we’ve found out is the differences that are often attributed to “good” and “naughty” dogs (“stubborn”/”cooperative”, “smart”/”stupid”, “friendly”/”aggressive”… the list goes on and on), are really our own misunderstandings of the needs and wants of each individual. In other words, dogs are great when their relationship with their humans and their worlds are safe, healthy, enriching, and built on two-way communication. Your dog is already great, we cannot wait for him and you to grow that greatness and enjoy it.
You’re awesome. Seriously, we love your dog and we think you’re pretty wonderful, too. Whether you’re a dog professional or a first-time dog guardian, you’re here to explore how to flourish in your life with your dog, and help her flourish, too. So, call us cheesy, but we mean it! Your curiosity, commitment to learning and growing and interest in your best life with your dog is all you need to be a valued part of our community. We’re so glad you’re here.
The way we live with our dogs and enjoy them is something we want you to have, too! Because another thing we know for sure is that, contrary to the popular images of dog training and trainers out there, having a great relationship with your dog doesn’t depend on being a mystical, specially-endowed communicator. The skills that make for great training and relationships with dogs are available to all of us. You and your dog are awesome, so building an equally rich, rewarding relationship is a matter of knowledge, skills and adhering to a few bedrock principles in all that you do with your dog. Four, to be exact.
I: Appreciate the dog’s point of view
Dogs are everywhere in our modern world. They are a common part of life in the city, in the country, in the suburbs, and everywhere in between. We see them on TV, in movies, advertising, social media, in our own homes and lives. And we get it! You won’t be surprised to know that we understand why we modern humans are obsessed with and surround ourselves with dogs. They’re pretty great. Actually, we’d argue that they are even greater than most people might think, looking at all these popular images, but more on that in a bit.
Because dogs are a common part of our world, we often think of them as ordinary. And what’s more, what’s ordinary often feels quite familiar, even when it’s not! And this is a hurdle we must overcome if we want to start to see just how differently our dogs experience the world. Because in order to appreciate the dog’s point of view, we have to get curious enough to learn what that is. Once we learn, a whole universe of possibilities open up. When we seek to understand dogs first, we become better teachers and trainers.
Have you ever looked at your dog and wondered what she sees? What she thinks? What she feels? Maybe you wish she could tell you (And she can! We’ll show you how!). Or maybe you’ve been utterly frustrated and baffled by her going nuts at a… is that a blowing plastic bag?! Whether you’re curious, frustrated, or have simply never thought about how your dog experiences your world, we can promise you that this pillar is both the most important and rewarding way to approach any interaction with your dog. Our dogs’ ability to perceive, feel, think and engage their worlds is extraordinary. Dogs are familiar, but their perspectives are not.
Appreciating your dog’s point of view has two important aspects. First, we need to understand canine senses, emotions and cognition. Then, we need to approach our training and interactions with them informed by and with empathy for these differences. When we do, we are more effective, efficient, and kind. And our relationship can truly begin. After all, if someone told you that they had a great relationship with you, but didn’t know the first thing about how you saw the world, you’d wonder just how one-sided your relationship was, right?
So take a moment to learn what your dog can see, hear, think, feel and understand, then see if you can find these extraordinary abilities in your own dog (they’re there!). Do you know how to ask your dog a question about how she’s feeling? Do you know how to answer her? We can teach you that. Do you know how you can use your dog’s natural abilities and smarts to teach even the most complex skills? Doing that means you’ll need to know what those abilities are in the first place. For emotional wellness, for effectiveness, and for a fabulous relationship, it’s on us, the humans, to always keep our dog’s experience in mind.
II: Recognize and meet the dog’s needs
Those special species-specific and individual traits that your dog comes with means that your dog has dog-specific and individual needs. Like us, dogs have basic needs: for adequate food, water, and shelter. And just like us, their needs go far beyond these bare bones basics. Like all of us, dogs are born to behave, to use their skills and abilities to get what’s good in their world and avoid danger. This means that dogs don’t just want to do a lot of the things we see them doing, they need to. Things like digging, chasing, dissecting/destroying toys or other items, chewing, foraging/scavenging/hunting, sniffing, resting, playing and many other species appropriate behaviors are ALL needs for canine companions.
And we haven’t even mentioned the most overlooked and fundamental need of all: safety. Like all of us, dogs need to both be and to feel safe, in order to enjoy their world and thrive as our companions. Ensuring safety is the bedrock need that underlies all others (which is why it’s an integral part of the Harmony Model, our five-element roadmap to getting to your best life with your canine companion.)
These dog-specific behaviors will find a way to express themselves, even if we try to suppress them. And we shouldn’t! It should be in a dog’s bill of rights that he is allowed to be himself, maybe especially in these quintessentially canine ways.
So, when we begin with a commitment to this second pillar, we are committing to meet our dog’s needs rather than to suppress them. This means honoring the dogness of our dog as well as her individual needs, preferences, hobbies, and joys (even when they’re pretty weird– why does she bury all her toys under her toy basket?!).
Much of what is counted as canine misbehavior is actually just canine… behavior. It’s just a dog doing dog stuff! But committing to meeting your dog’s needs isn’t committing to having your shoes chewed up, to having your dog barking like mad at every person who goes by, or to allowing him to scavenge goodies off the sidewalk, quite the opposite. When we commit to our dog’s needs, we are committing to intentionally providing ways for dogs to meet these needs, so that they don’t have to choose ways that are annoying or dangerous to us. In short, meeting our dog’s needs is meeting our human needs. We can both have what we want and need only once we stop trying to suppress the dogness of our dogs, and instead choose a path that honors the glorious differences between us.
III: Understand and apply positive training
Honoring dogness in a human world requires us to step up and teach! We teach our dogs how to behave in the face of all sorts of human-designed challenges (walking in a straight line restrained on a leash, without investigating all the interesting smells, squirrels or other dogs). And this is another area where the special nature of our dogs really shines: when we teach life skills in a way that strengthens our relationship of trust and love with our dogs, they learn to handle so much of our rather demanding world!
We know how to teach dogs, and teach people to teach dogs, and we also know that win-win relationships are built on focusing on what we want more of from our dogs.
We know, often when things aren’t going well with our dogs, all we can focus on is what we want our dogs to stop doing. “Stop pulling me!” “Stop jumping on the kids!” “PLEASE stop barking, it’s just a package delivery!!” When our dogs are interfering with our own human wants and needs, we often focus on what they’re doing that’s causing us all that grief. But, here’s the thing, dogs don’t ever, ever, EVER stop doing something . . . they start doing something else. Imagine this: you have a spot in your front yard that turns into a lake every time it rains. It’s horribly muddy, and every time you or your dog or your kids walk through the yard in the wet season, you come out looking like swamp creatures. You want to get rid of that mud! How do you stop it? Well you can try to remove the water, sure. But if you don’t fill the hole, the next time it rains you’ll all be muddy again. If you want to end the mud for good, you’ll need to… fill up the hole so there’s no room for the water. That’s just how dog behavior (and all behavior) works! Living beings are behaving all the time, and so behavior never stops, there’s never a hole, it’s just replaced by other behavior. If you’ve been frustrated with your dog’s training, wondering why you have to teach the same thing over and over and over, you might be scooping water out of the hole. Ask us how we know (ok, we’ll just tell you: we’ve done it too!).
So at Positively, we’re not just committed to helping you meet your dog’s needs, we’re committed to doing so in a way that produces long-lasting harmony between you and your dog, and that meets your needs as well. Teaching what you want is essential to this second part of the deal. Just like with the front yard mud pit, teaching what you want is a better, faster, and more permanent way to both stop unwanted behavior and get new behavior you like. It’s a constructive way to build your best life with your dog.
So when you commit to teach what you want, you are committing to meeting your needs and expanding your dog’s world. After all, a dog with lots of skills and a great relationship with their person is welcome in many more places, is able to enjoy many more things, and is just more enjoyable to be with. Sure, when we take our dogs out with these skills, people everywhere exclaim “oh my gosh, he’s so well-behaved!”. But here’s the secret, we know that it’s much much more than that: teaching what we want and meeting our dog’s needs, all while attending to their experience means we’re moving through the world in harmony.
IV: Avoid fear, physical punishment and intimidation
We hope that, by the time you are at this fourth pillar, you can guess why we include it: fear, pain and intimidation simply have no place in the relationship we really want you to have with your dog. In fact, depending on these tactics will work against the dreams we have for your best life with your canine companion, undermine your relationship, and make you a less effective trainer.
We get it, messages telling you that your dog needs to be managed by intimidation are everywhere. We see them too, on social media, on television, in books and in the mouths of people we trust. We are constantly told that dogs are out to dominate, control, and manipulate us and that the only way we can maintain order is by bringing down that hammer, or at least threatening to do it. What’s worse, many of us have also experienced this kind of control by intimidation, threats or pain, we may have learned that this is what teaching or training is, in the end. But in the modern landscape of dog training, we’d venture to say that this is the biggest, most damaging myth of all.
Using special techniques or tools that rely on doing something unwanted when our dogs misbehave is a quick ticket to bigger problems. That’s because your dog is learning all the time, and they are not just learning what they do, they are learning how to feel and react.
Let’s imagine you are teaching your dog to come when called, so she can enjoy bodily freedom safely in large spaces. You read about two methods, one that involves calling her and once she gets to you, making that next minute of her life the best ever minute (treats? A ball toss? Maybe a game of chase? All of the above?). You also read that you can do all of this by pushing a button on a special collar that beeps, then delivers electric shock to her neck, which you press if she doesn’t come to you and keep on until she returns to you. You are assured that the shock is low, and that you won’t have to use it forever, soon, you’ll just need the beep! In both cases, the dog will learn to come, you think so what’s the issue? Well, remember those emotional associations? You aren’t just teaching her to come to you, you’re teaching her how to feel as she is returning to you. In the first method, what would her feeling be? Excitement, even joy perhaps. In the second, what might her feelings be? Trying to avoid something unpleasant doesn’t bring up a lot of joy for most of us, dogs included, and depending on how unpleasant it is, it can make us anxious, angry, even downright terrified. These emotional associations are messy, too. So, those emotions don’t just get baked into the behavior we’re teaching, they also get attached to the whole scenario– the place where the good or bad things happened, the animals and sights that were there, and even to the trainer, you. This is especially concerning, because the most difficult, dangerous behaviors that dogs and all animals show are when they are trying to get away from something that has scared or hurt them. Much behavior labeled as aggression, phobia, and even frantic “out of control” behaviors are rooted in earlier emotional associations, people, places and things, even when it’s not deliberately as in our shock example here. Perhaps equally importantly, even though both these methods supposedly teach the same thing, did you notice that they don’t? Not convinced? Think back to a time when you’ve run away from something, preferably as urgently as we hope our dogs come when they’re called. Now, compare that to when you’ve run toward something you love and want to be close to. Are those the same thing?
So, don’t be fooled into thinking you have to choose between being kind to your dog and having a well-behaved dog. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Managing your dog’s behavior by force never has and never will get you to your best life with your dog. And if you’ve used those techniques in the past or are currently using them, we want you to know that it’s the techniques and tools that are standing in the way of your dreams for you and your dog, not you and not your dog. You’re also in good company, many of us have used those methods in the past, and once we found a better way, we never looked back. We’re so happy you’re here.
These four pillars underlie everything we do, and everything we want to share with you and your dog. Once you’ve made these commitments, it’s time to get going and start building your next step: harmony, joy and ease together with your amazing canine companion. We’re so pleased you’re here, and we’re excited for you to dive in. We have so much to share with you!
