Kora The Australian Shepherd

“We know a lot about good training these days. We know about errorless learning, setting up environments to foster success, and using our knowledge of total circumstances to change behavior in ways that are both kind and effective for the learner. We know how to create training plans, track our progress, find the holes in our training and take responsibility for the success of the learner. We know so much!

And it appears that as we know more, there has been a concurrent rise in our levels of guilt when we are unable to provide for the dog at the level that we have been taught. When our own emotions or needs come to the fore. Or when we just get tired of trying so hard to get it right. It’s true that when you know better you can do better. Or you can be too tired to do better, and just feel bad about the whole thing. The dog is barking so we yelled at the dog. We got too close to a trigger and the dog responded badly. We forgot to work on cooperative care, and the dog backslid on their nail trims. Hell, we forgot to teach cooperative care at all and now our dog has a serious illness and spends a lot of very unhappy time at the vet.

Woulda coulda shoulda… And it’s always our fault. Always! Because that is the belief structure of a positive reinforcement trainer; we take responsibility for what happens, for what we did and did not train. Which is fine. I happen to believe that too. But it leads to another problem, which is how we view ourselves when we fail to succeed when we “knew” better.

Dogs have managed for thousands of years to live with humans. Most of them, the majority, figured stuff out even with the most ignorant of owners. Look at the world around you! Most dogs get no formal training at all, and the ones who do get some formal training often receive one round of mediocre instruction at best.

Dogs deal with the fact that people yell, throw things at them and make some pretty god-awful bad training decisions on a regular basis, from the moment they arrive and right through their “sensitive” periods. Forget discussions of antecedent, behavior, and consequences; how about just trying to get people not to rub their dog’s nose in their poo when they have an accident in the house? And those people? The ones who know nothing, and allow the dog to take full responsibility for everything? They have no guilt. They have basic expectations of a dog as a dog, and they rely on the fact that dogs seem to manage in spite of all of our worst decisions – often successfully!

And those of us who know a lot? Well educated? Cutting edge and current on the best possible practices for raising, training, socializing, and interacting with our dogs, and taking full responsibility for their emotional, physical, and mental well-being? Enriching their environments? Training them on everything that we can possibly predict they might need at some point in their lives, from canine cooperative care, to calm greetings of other dogs? We often take on dogs that are challenging rather than typical and then we have chronic guilt. We made a mistake! We yelled at a dog and we know better! We left our dog with separation anxiety alone and set ourselves back a month! And that leads to…guilt. We knew better. We failed the dog. We failed ourselves.

Is this what we signed up for? Is this dog ownership? I see this as a rising trend, this tendency towards guilt when we are unable to do exactly the right things at all times, in particular with dogs that are NOT typical – dogs that would not have been kept alive even twenty years ago, never mind attempting to rehabilitate the dog to the point of being able to compete or engage in public outings.

So here is my thought on the matter. Let’s start by understanding that the average dog manages in spite of it all. In spite of absolutely ignorant raising and terrible training, the average dog is successful. That means that if your dog is not successful with average training, then your dog is outside of the norm. Congratulations for going above and beyond and working to help your dog!

Now, at every step of the way, you need to remember that you didn’t get average. You got challenging. And the fact that you are working on it? You should be proud of every single effort and opportunity that you take to make things better for your dog, because not so long ago? That dog wouldn’t have made it at all. When we talk to other people, we need to keep this first and foremost in our minds. Yes, we can diagram out behavior plans for people to follow, and we should do so because we are dog trainers! But we must never forget that most dogs don’t require those behavior plans; those are not typical dogs. And so the owners are going to be frustrated and resentful. And they’re going to make a lot of errors. And what we should focus on is the fact that they are doing it at all; that they are taking on a dog that is not typical and they are doing their best – a typical dog would have figured it out for them.

I mean perceiving an animal product as something you actively choose to use, or even a luxury, instead of a default.

Right now most people would see meat, milk and eggs and part of their staple diet. They’re part of the food pyramids we call get taught, and there’s usually at least one of them in every meal. Because they’re seen as default, there’s a strong pressure to get them as cheap as possible, to make staples affordable for everyone, and this is why and how practices like factory farming came about. People have to eat, and it’s hard to care a whole lot about various welfare implications of different food production systems when you’re overworked and desperately trying to feed yourself and your dependents. 

It is tempting to see high welfare foods - free range meat, permaculture products, kind milk etc- as somewhat elitist, upper class, etc products. And from a certain point of view, they are. At least, right now. Factory farm systems have been slow to improve animal welfare in part because doing so reduces their profitability. The more space you afford an individual animal, the less animals you can fit on your property and the less money you make.

But, if consumers are willing to pay more for a product, take free range eggs for example, then producing that product starts to look more profitable. When you have a demand, supply will attempt to meet it.

You can’t realistically just go and close all the factory farms or other poorer welfare production systems out there overnight. The animals have to go somewhere, and they still supply a huge amount of food and people need to eat. But as there’s more demand for higher welfare production, the supply will change to reflect that.

For some, that means forking out the extra money for free range meat, kind milk, free range eggs, etc. For some it will mean going and buying directly from producers, so they know what sort of production system they’re paying for, or even producing their own food so they can control it directly. For some that will mean not using certain animal products, or animal products at all, because they don’t feel that any production system would have good enough welfare. And all of those choices are fine. 

Upworthy carried a story summarizing an experiment demonstrating that rats exhibit empathy. Why do I care about this? Because the graphics showing the experiment on Upworthy made me smile, and smiling is good. Here’s the link in case you want to watch the video embedded in the story.

Some scientists ran an experiment to demonstrate that. Here’s how it worked:

The scientists put a rat in water (which rats hate). Not enough to hurt the rat, but enough to annoy it.

Then they put another rat in a safer, dry area with a door it could open to save the first rat.

When the dry rat heard the damp, miserable rat get upset, she came to the rescue.

Still not satisfied with the result, the scientists ran a more complex test.

What if you bribe the dry rat with food? Will she ignore it to rescue the wet rat in the next chamber?

Scientists presumed it would be easier for the not-in-peril rat to take the obvious selfless route when it was given only one choice. But what if they gave her a delicious bribe (chocolate cereal) and then let her choose between saving her friend and a buffet?

The rats, by a significant margin, still usually saved their friend before getting their delicious bribe. What does that mean?

Rats might care more about each other than things like food, and that prioritization might be encoded in their DNA.

Why should we care about super-thoughtful rats?

It is often argued that humans are inherently selfish — that without guidance, we would all default to killing and stealing and an “every person for themselves” mentality. That we only help others if it helps us. That evolution can’t make us selfless; it’s something we have to force ourselves to do.

But if rats show human-like qualities (they laugh like us, they dream like us, they like to have selfless lovers) like altruism, that means it isn’t a human-learned behavior. It could be encoded in our DNA. It means humans could be empathetic and kind by default.

It also means that rats and humans have more in common than we think.

This blog is 100% anti PETA.

We love our vegetarian and vegan friends and family (and I have a lot of them!!). We don’t support an organization that claimes to love animals and does nothing but hurt them and the people who love them.