Hi {{first_name}} ,

The calmest dogs I have ever worked with were not the ones with the easiest lives.

That used to surprise me. You would expect a dog that had been sheltered from stress, never pushed, never corrected, to be the settled one in the room. But it was almost never the case. The dogs that could handle anything were usually the ones that had been through something first.

There is a reason for that. And once you understand it, the way you think about training changes.

This Issue's Insights:

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Your heart is a muscle.

People die of heart failure because their hearts are weak. The thing that prevents that is cardiovascular exercise, controlled stress applied to the heart over time. The heart tears down slightly. It rebuilds stronger. That is not a metaphor for something else. That is literally what happens.

The same principle applies to every muscle in your body. You go to the gym, you put stress on the muscle, it tears down, it rebuilds bigger. You do not destroy the muscle. You apply controlled stress and the muscle responds by getting stronger.

I was driving to track with Schmoo and this thought hit me: that is exactly what we do for our dogs in training.

We put small, controlled levels of stress on them so that the larger, uncontrolled stress of the real world does not tear them down.

A dog chasing cars is going to encounter one of two stressors.

The first is a correction, be it on a  long line, an e-collar or on a prong collar. A level of discomfort that communicates: that direction is not the one you want to go.

The second is getting hit by the car.

The correction is not the harm. The correction is the lower-level stress that teaches and thereby prevents the higher-level stress. That is the whole argument in one example. And yet there are people who would have you believe the correction is “the cruelty.”

Taking stress completely out of the picture does not produce a calm dog. It produces a dog that has never learned to handle stress. The first time real stress arrives, and it will arrive, the dog has no framework for navigating it.

There is a version of this argument that is true.

Uncontrolled stress, excessive stress, stress without relationship, stress without teaching, that damages dogs. A correction on a dog who does not understand what you want is not a correction. It is abuse. Those are not the same thing and I have said that in this newsletter as well as before.

The distinction is not whether stress is present. The distinction is whether it is controlled, proportionate, and delivered by someone the dog trusts, someone with the dog’s best interest at heart.

Goofy, Maya, Duane, Jimi, Schmoo…  Every dog I have trained for clients. Every dog I have worked with at a shelter. My number one goal has always been (and always will be) the same: What is best for the dog?!

And what is best for the dog is not a life without challenge. It is a life with the right challenges, delivered by the right person, at the right time.

That is what fair training looks like. Not soft. Not harsh. Fair.

The calm dog is not the one with less drive.

It is the one who learned to handle stress because you introduced it at a controlled level before the world did it at an uncontrolled one.

That dog does not panic when something unexpected happens. He does not explode at stimulation because it has never built a framework for handling stimulation. He reads the situation, looks to you, and waits for direction.

That dog was built. Not by removing every difficult thing from his path. By walking through difficult things together, at a pace the dog could handle, with someone he trusted to bring him through the other side.

That is the work.

If you've ever corrected your dog and immediately wondered whether you did it right, this is for you.

Not the person looking for shortcuts. The person who genuinely wants to communicate better with their dog and is not sure corrections are helping or hurting.

I've been building a Corrections Masterclass around that exact question. When corrections work, when they don't, and what has to be in place before they do anything useful.

Subscribers get first access when it opens.

1. Watch the work, not the highlight reel

The Dog Training Videos on my YouTube channel shows full sessions, not edits. Dogs that don't cooperate. Sessions that don't go smoothly. Real training, start to finish. That's the playlist that will actually teach you something. 

[DOG-TRAINING VIDEOS]

2.  Ask me directly

Every week inside my online membership I run a member Q&A. Members post questions, I answer them on camera. If you want to see how training really works, the stumbling blocks, the adjustments, the resolution, that's where it lives. [MEMBERSHIP]

3. The Decision Matrix - FREE: If you don’t already have it, and if you're not sure when to correct and when to redirect, that confusion is costing you every session. I put together a free guide that walks you through exactly how to make that call.