Why Good Dog Training Makes for Bad TV
Javier Brosch/stock.adobe.com
I’ll bet if I think long and hard about it I’ll come up with even worse things, but I think that one of the worst things to happen to dog training is the creation of tv shows about dog training.
I was a kid of the 70s. TV shows back then included Happy Days, The Waltons, MASH, The Mary Tyler Show, Welcome Back Kotter, and many others that are now considered “classics” (which is a very kind way of pointing out how old we are if we watched them when they first aired). These shows were generally light-hearted or downright funny. Yet, they often dealt with serious issues. Mary Tyle Moore put a spotlight on problems in the workplace for working women. Several of the popular shows were about the trial and tribulations of being a teenager. MASH was even about our country’s involvement in the Korean war. Each week, the characters faced some sort of dilemma that was entirely sorted by the end of the show thirty minutes later (not including the time for commercials). Often, one of the “wise” characters would step in to offer some assistance. Grandma on the Waltons always knew just what to say. Father Mulcahy often pointed Hawkeye in the right direction. Even Lou Grant, with his oft-outdated viewpoints, could soothe Mary and give her the strength to carry on one more day.
Of course, we saw these for what they were. Snippets of daily life presented to us as entertainment. They weren’t actually intended as roadmaps for our own lives. Sure, they might remind us of the messages we’d received from our parents as we were growing up (be kind, work hard, perservere!). But they weren’t expected to replace the “professionals” (parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, teachers, and other mentors). They were, quite clearly, entertainment.
Even documentaries didn’t try to teach us everything we needed to know. I watched Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom every week. But I never thought that I was an animal expert because of it. After seeing several shows about African lions, I wouldn’t have considered myself ready to put on a pith hat and trek through the Serengeti to find and observe prides of lions in the wild. I knew that I was getting just a snippet. Only as much information as time would allow in the weekly show.
Then came Cesar Milan. Much like Happy Days, a character on the show would have a problem which would be entirely solved 30 minutes later. The show would start out with a dramatic display of a serious problem that got our heart pumping - often a snarling dog lunging towards the dog owners or our hero and host, Cesar. Then, Cesar would demonstrate how to “fix” the problem. And the difference was amazing! The dog that was snarling and lunging and possibly biting just thirty minutes ago was now calm and compliant and “happy!” knowing it’s place in the family.
But, for some reason, many of us felt like that was a how-to show that equipped us to go out and teach other “aggressive” dogs how to behave. We didn’t just think, “wow, that Cesar guy knows his stuff and that highly-edited show gave us just a tiny glimpse into all that happened.” No, we seemed to think, “aha! I see what he did - and I can do that too!”
And others followed. There are still some of these shows on tv. And there are tons of these shows on social media. Some are as short as 30 seconds. The thing that’s common in the most popular ones are those dramatic displays at the beginning. We see dogs snarling and lunging and (presumably) trying to bite people. And, a few minutes later, we see a relaxed, calm, happy dog! And we think, “gosh, that guy really knows his stuff! And I see what he did - I’ll bet I can do that myself.” Sometimes we might think, “aha! He really knows what he’s doing - maybe I’ll hire him to fix my dog.”
But this brings us to two different problems.
These problems are rarely solved in 30 minutes - and certainly not in 30 seconds.
Most of the trainers presenting these dramatic displays use outdated and potentially dangerous training methods based on pain, fear, and intimidation to supress unwanted behaviors. We ALL want unwanted behaviors to go away (that’s why we call them “unwanted”)! But I want to address the reasons for those scary outbursts - not just box up all that stress so that it might burst out again in the future. If I can teach a dog that the thing they used to find scary (and the barking and lunging is frequently meant to get that scary thing to move away), then the behavior will take care of itself.
Suppressing behaviors can sometimes be fast. If we apply sufficient pain to an animal, we can often change their behavior after one application of that pain. But we won’t have done anything at all to address the reason behind that behavior. So, we’ll just get another problem. Or we’ll end up with a dog who learns that there’s nothing they can do when faced with something scary but to shut down. I’ve seen those dogs and it’s a sad thing to see. You don’t want to turn your dog into one of them.
Competent dog trainers don’t set dogs up to fail.
When we work with fearful, reactive, aggressive dogs (just some of the labels for the types of behaviors clients call us about), competent dog trainers don’t put the dog in situations to cause the problem behavior to display. When dog owners say, “want me to show you how bad he can be?” we quickly tell them that it’s not necessary. We’ve all seen scared dogs attempting to create distance between themselves and the scary thing before. And we don’t want the dog upset past their ability to remain calm. The goal is to teach the dog to handle the stress - not to practice the dramatic displays that demonstrate their worries.
Instead, we teach our clients about exposing their dogs to the scary thing in a way (distance, duration, or intensity) the dog can still feel safe while forming new associations and learning new behaviors. And we practice those situations over and over, teaching the owner how to read their dog’s body language, giving the dog additional space when needed, taking breaks to keep the dog feeling safe, pairing the experience with good things (typically something yummy to eat) - and we keep doing it until we start seeing a positive response from the dog. Only then will we intentionally make it a little harder (decreasing the distance between the dog and the scary thing, for example). And we keep repeating that process until the dog is either happy to see the thing they formerly worried about or, at least, just don’t care anymore when that thing shows up.
Sure, we sometimes make mistakes or are surprised when the scary thing shows up closer than we were expecting and our dog gets upset. We don’t do our training a laboratory where we can always control every possibility. But those types of accidents are few and far between if we’re doing it right. And we accept that it might cause a step backwards in our training plan, so we give the dog a break, give them more distance, and help them move forward again as they are ready.
Watching this is sometimes about as exciting as watching corn grow. It’s rewarding when we have results, but the process is fairly boring. In a recent social media post, my friends at The Dog Evolved said of an outing with a reactive dog, “The training session looks boring, which is how we like it.”
The bases for good dog training are often consistency, repetition, and patience - and those aren’t very exciting to the casual viewer. In contrast to the high-stakes drama and instant gratification typical of mainstream entertainment, the gradual progress and incremental successes of dog training do not capture the attention of those seeking more fast-paced or emotionally charged content.
That’s why are are so few good trainers on tv. The audience willing to watch long-term change over longer periods of time just aren’t there. I don’t blame the audience, of course. It IS boring to watch much of the time (not for dog trainers - we live to see this sort of gradual improvement!). There ARE some good dog trainers on Instagram and Facebook and TikTok and such. But they often have lower engagement (fewer followers) and they’ve figured out how to edit those long and repetitive sessions into more engaging works. But even then, they just don’t have that grabber at the beginning - that snarling dog.
Sometimes this makes it look like the dog we’re training isn’t truly aggressive (a criticism often leveled by trainers who have to resort to the use of pain, fear, and intimidation to modify behavior). That’s not quite right though. We’re simply trying to prevent the dog who has put someone in the hospital with serious injuries from feeling like they need to do the same thing again - and instead learn to trust and behave in other ways that are much preferred by all. The goal is to keep everyone safe and feeling safe.