#dogtrainingandbehavior

In my decades of filming dog sports, starting a GSD kennel, and now managing Leerburg.com and producing online courses, I've encountered several people from various schools of training. The controversial topic of "corrections in dog training" comes up often. Here, I will tell you a little about my experience in dog training and why I feel the need to talk about this subject.

There are three types of all-positive trainers:

Those who emulate PetSmart. They run all-positive training courses and don't mention corrections. These kinds of people know better but choose to cash in on the image of all-positive training.

There are all-positive trainers who love animals and push the all-positive concept but simply lack the experience to know better.

There are all-positive trainers who compete and win in various dog sports. These competitors do an excellent job of desensitizing their competition dogs to ignore the distractions their dogs will face in their respective dog sport.

I only have issues with those in the first two categories and I will explain why in a minute.

I respect and admire most of those trainers in the third category because they know that 99.999% of every pet dog out there will require a "distraction/correction phase" at the end of a training program. The only people from this third category I don't respect are those trainers who tell others they can train any pet dog using their all-positive methods and never have to correct the dog. It's a scam.