When I was a child my father used to knock seven bells out of me. It worked. When he was around and in that sort of mood, I was the most beautifully behaved child you could ever hope to meet. I barely dared to breathe let alone anything else.Brook wrote:Say we have children, and each one of are trying our best to raise our child the right way, but your technique, and my technique might be totally different in how we raise our children. Does that mean that each one of us are wrong in what we are trying to accomplish, which is well behaved, and adjusted children?
I just have an open mind to things and I see advantages in different training methods, not to say that everything I see is the right way.
Despite how that may sound, I do believe he thought he was doing the right thing, he was trying to raise polite well behaved kids. And I grew up to be a polite well behaved adult, and I am fairly well adjusted I guess.
But the end never justified the means. What he did to me was wrong, very wrong, and IMNSHO there was and is no justification for it. It isn't always shades of grey, some methods are just plain wrong.
So it isn't enough for a technique to work, there are other measures that have to be considered as well, and kindness is one of them.
Having an open mind about training methods is one thing (and generally a good thing at that) but there are some things that are never acceptable, no matter what. You draw a line and you don't step over it.
Kicking dogs in the ribs, jabbing them in the neck, alpha rolling them, psychologically threatening and intimidating them is abuse. I wouldn't care if it was the most effective and efficient training method available (which it isn't), there is still no place for abuse in training.
I never want to be in a position where my dog does as I ask purely because he is terrified of what I will do to him if he doesn't. He deserves better than that.
But the thing I dislike most about CM is that he does these things slyly, without being honest and upfront with the viewers. Which leaves people with a completely false impression as to what he is really doing. E.g. he talks about calmly subduing dogs when he means throttling them. It's no wonder viewers get the wrong idea. People come away thinking that he was worked some sort of magic by communicating with them. Whereas really it's just another terrified shut down dog.
If he was honest about what he was doing (next time the dog does X I'm going to kick it/jab it/etc, it will soon be more frightened of me than it is of X) I would have more respect for him (though not for his methods) but then he wouldn't be nearly so popular and popularity means ratings and ratings mean money.
In the meantime it's the dogs who suffer, at the hands of their owners who think they are doing the right thing by following his examples, and that's the real tragedy.
He was also full of infection which nobody had picked up on, once the infection went, he grew 2 inches, the infection was pulling him down. He was sent to England to be rehomed because nobody could get him to interact with him. Now he reacts to anyone with an Irish accent, he won't have anything to do with them and tries to escape.
