Sometimes you get the crap beat out of you and you come away thinking, “Yeah, I probably deserved that.” And then there are other times when you manage to crawl away and all you can think is, “What the hell was that about?!?” Those mystery beat-downs are happening to me a lot lately. There’s some kinda weirdness goin on these days and I am at a loss to explain it. Let me back up a few steps and try it from there.
When I started writing Canine Nation four years ago, I was covering all kinds of stuff that I learned from reinforcement based training. Learning theory, operant and classical conditioning, clicker training and raising a dog with it for 6 years taught me plenty. Teaching my dog to do agility with it was a blast and it showed me just how far you can go with behavioural science and a dog. So, I wrote about it.
Predictably, I got pummeled by Traditional and Balanced trainers who didn’t believe in all of that “food training” and they had a million reasons why I was ruining my dog and why I was an idiot or worse. But I expected that. I was bucking the system. I was doing things differently from the mainstream and when you try to tell people that their dearly held beliefs about dogs might not be quite on the money, well, they get upset. You expect to get knocked around when you challenge the status quo.
I gotta tell you, I never expected it from the other side. Who would have thought I wasn’t being positive enough for some people!
No one needs to tell me that the Internet can be a mean and heartless place. I’ve been around on-line forums since the days when you had to have a modem that you used with dial-up telephone connections. I learned all about “trolling” and “flame wars” back in the 1980’s. The Internet today isn’t a new jungle, there’s just a helluva lot more monkeys out there and some of them are more vicious than you imagine they could be. But lately the Facebook-verse of dog-related groups has started to polarize and get ugly and I wish I could figure out why.
Perhaps the recent efforts to bring “positive” trainers together in some organized way has been a factor. Or it could be that the proliferation of the new “group” feature on Facebook has allowed like minded people to form their own lynch-mobs for their favourite target. It could even be that setting up groups to support their favourite dog-related thing has just invited those with different views to go after them for being so public about it. What ever it is, it’s getting real ugly real fast.
On one level, Facebook (and the Internet in general) can be seen as the Great Leveller. A place where everyone is equal and we all get to have or say. But it’s not quite that simple. It’s not a democracy where we all get to read what we like and then vote on the Truth as it should be for everyone. We all have equal access but we don’t all have equal value when we get to have our say on something. Yeah, I know that’s pretty hard to swallow for some people but Tom Nichols explains this brilliantly in his article The Death of Expertise. It’s a good read and I encourage you to give it a read and maybe even bookmark it like I did.
I didn’t start writing Canine Nation four years ago because I had some flash-of-insight moral conversion to the right way to train dogs by being kinder and more humane to them. Canine Nation started over 12 years ago when I first started learning about behavioural science and how it applied to dogs. I went out and used it and thought about it and tested it and struggled with it for more than eight years before I wrote a single word of Canine Nation. I worked with dogs and people and video and tried every way I could to investigate and understand what I was seeing and experiencing. Then I started writing. Only after I had some experience and wisdom behind me. And I wanted to write about why this way of working and being with dogs was easier and more effective for both the humans and the dogs in our home. There was no moral agenda.
But nowadays there seems to be a “club” of sorts. The “positive training movement” for lack of a better term (that’s not what they call themselves – they have many names and there seem to be more labels everyday) is out there to save the dogs and “right” the “wrongs.” They are happy to tell you all of the ways we abuse and harm dogs physically, mentally, or emotionally. And they seem to desperately want to find a pigeon-hole for you as quickly a possible. They are on a crusade. You are one of “us” or you are one of “THEM.” You’re either on their side or you are against them. Drink the Kool Aid or don’t drink the Kool Aid.
When I write Canine Nation articles, I’m not trying to deliver the TRUTH to anyone about dogs or training. I’m trying to tell my readers what I have found to be true. Today. Right now. Based on what I know. And that could change. That’s very different from “the one true way” that some others talk about. Frankly, I don’t want my readers to take my word for it. Anything I write should be a starting point. Go test it for yourself and tell me what you think!
Anyone can drink the Kool Aid. Just swallow it down and you’re part of the group. That’s not for me. I’m not done learning and testing and investigating and trying to understand more about my dogs. I can’t reduce things down to a series of black and white choices just for the sake of belonging to a group. My views are going to change and they should. The only group I am likely to be a part of is the “seekers” who keep looking for more answers and not because I decided to join them but because I have simply found myself among them on the road to more understanding.
I hope that Canine Nation and our Canine Nation Forum group on Facebook can provide a nice place to stop and rest and share what we’ve learned along the way with respect and without judgement. Hopefully we’re all on this road together.
Eric
February 22, 2014
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