Hi {{first_name}} ,

Jamie Penrith flew over from the UK for the IACP conference and had one free day in his schedule. He spent it on the ground at the shelter with me, next to a play group. What he said while he was watching those dogs is the reason I am writing this.

Here is the part nobody wants to hear.

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I think dog training is simple. I still cannot imagine it being complicated. When somebody makes it complicated, one of two things is going on. Either they cannot communicate a simple idea simply, or the complication is what keeps them employed. Jamie said it better than I did. Listen to how I phrase things, he said. Look how many words I can chain together that you probably do not understand, all with scientific validation behind them.

He also said something that should bother every trainer who has bought a mentorship. He has never once stopped in the middle of working a dog to ask himself which quadrant he was operating in, or what his ratio of reinforcement was. Not once in his whole career. He cannot see a time he ever would.

Jamie spent his free day on the ground next to a play group so he could watch dogs sort each other out. The day before, at the science summit, an ethologist talked about studying natural behavior in its natural environment.

For these dogs, the play yard is that environment. We domesticated them and shaped them into something that lives in our houses, and they still read each other in ways you can only catch live. You can watch my videos, and I have a lot of them. In person the energy and the sound of it land differently.

Jamie’s comparison was blunt. People will pay thousands for a course that teaches them less than an afternoon in this yard would.'s a dog that was never told what the rules were, so he wrote them himself.

There is a man standing in the middle of that play group right now.

Watch what he does with his hands, which is almost nothing. His presence is what the dogs are reading, and they stay comfortable with him in there.

People see that and assume they can walk in and get the same result. A fight broke out here the other day and I knew what it was from the sound, before I saw it, so I walked over and helped.

If a play group gets messy and looks bad for a minute, that is because these are dogs.

I put up a clip once of two dogs squaring off, and one of them pulled a chunk of fur off the back of the other. The comments were a wall of the same thing. Correct that. Straight to jail.

Watch the video unfold and none of it was necessary.

Here is what the checklist tells people. Tail up and the body gone stiff, so correct him. That posture might be a message aimed at the other dog, and the other dog reads it fine.

Dogs communicate almost entirely without sound, and a bark is closer to a side effect. Then the ears and the tail come down and the whole thing turns into play.

If it had gone bad instead, you would tell yourself you should have corrected sooner, and you might be wrong about that too. Let it get to the point where a correction is appropriate.not a project. That's a good dog waiting on the wrong system to figure him out.

I used to run them. The dog is not stupid. He learns the rules of my house. Then he goes back to his own house where the rules are different, and he starts finding the weak spots in the fabric and learning where to poke holes.

Jamie described two of his own dogs, both taken out of previous homes, who went after each other at any opportunity. Loud, a lot of bravado behind empty pistols. He let those two work it out between themselves, because they live together and he is thousands of miles away. His assertiveness does nothing for them in a hallway he is not standing in.

He would never let a dog work something out toward another person's dog or a stranger on the street. That one is his job. You can be assertive only when you are confident, and confident only when you have control of the dog in front of you.

My theory here has not changed. Get the good dogs out as fast and as many as possible, so what is left behind are the dogs who actually need work, and the trainers who come in looking for that work can find them.

I do not want a dog with real behavior landing in a home with no training behind him. I will see ten or fifteen dogs in a day here and maybe one of them has a behavior like the one we saw this morning. Anybody who sat where Jamie sat today would already know that.

If you’d like to learn more about Jamie’s training, which is awesome, check out his online training program: [Take The Lead Training]

1. Free Training Content on My Website

If you work with shelter dogs or you're evaluating a dog for adoption, I've put together detailed guides on behavioral assessment, what to look for in an evaluation, and how to read dogs under stress. No email required. Head over to [ROBERTCABRAL.COM] and dig in.

2. Membership and community support

If you want to go deeper on any of this, everything is inside my membership. 250-plus lessons, over 85 hours of instruction, organized so you can find exactly what you need. Right now for only $29/mo. [BECOME A MEMBER]

3. The Corrections in Dog Training Masterclass: If you don’t already have it, I recently launched this course for the person who has been working with dogs long enough to know corrections matter, but hasn’t had anyone sit down and walk through exactly how they work. - [LEARN MORE]

Until next Tuesday,

- Robert