I don’t get to watch TV much, but when I do I love to catch an episode of one of the popular dog training shows.  You know the ones where the trainer comes in and fixes the situation like a magician in a matter of delicately edited minutes?  Plus, who can resist watching Cesar Millan expound on the short comings of human nature or Victoria Stilwell command the situation while making funny faces of disgust?

While these shows are entertaining to say the least, there are some things that every dog-loving viewer should know about them.

First, I’ll state the obvious:  They are edited to make it look like weeks of hard work can happen in a few days, or even minutes. While this may be true for some issues that we dog trainers seemingly resolve like magic, I promise that years worth of bad behavior and/or aggression are rarely resolved in a half hour.  The saying, “don’t believe everything that you see on TV,” comes to mind here.

Second: Where’s the Trainer to Client loyalty? One of the most valuable and endearing things our dogs can teach us is to be loyal.  Yet I watch these shows and the trainers’ empathy switches seem to be stuck on ‘Off.’   When I read the book, ‘Marley & Me,’  I laughed at the brash military-style trainer who kicked Marley out of her obedience class, but is also made me sad.  Is this what people expect from dog trainers?  How horrendous!  A trainer’s job is to help you, not laugh at you or label you and your dog as failures because you may be outside of what they are used to.  I’ll be the first one to admit that I’ve met some interesting people in my dog journeys, but to judge them or expect them to understand dog behavior is just silly when they’re obviously seeking help.  There is a great deal of responsibility involved in helping families with their dogs.  Misbehaving canines weigh greatly on the overall happiness levels in a home, so a good dog trainer may impact a family far more than they realize.  The last thing I would want anyone to do is be afraid to tell me how life really is for them and their dog for fear that I may roll my eyes, become horrified at their actions, and throw my hands up in the air in total disgust.  If I gasped every time a client told me they let their dog on the couch or sleep in bed with them, I’d run out of air – not to mention I’d be a total hypocrite.

Third: They don’t show the ‘don’t try this at home’ disclaimer for nearly long enough. Seriously, DON’T try to pin or roll your dog to subdue them – a good many fingers have been lost this way.  And flooding your fearful dog with his (however irrational) worst fears all at once?  While this approach may appear effective for some dogs, I have one word that sums up the smallest and most common outcome from blindly implementing this technique:  Diarrhea.

Cesar Millan has definitely had a lot of success, which naturally leads a person to assume his techniques work.   And I am not here to say he is wrong.  But to say that one approach works for every dog is to say that every child learns in the same manner.  It’s just not true.  Considering Cesar’s extremely physical relationship with some of his student dogs, this makes his approach extremely dangerous to implement.  I can’t count the number of times I’ve met dogs who have been more damaged than helped due to an unknowing dog parent’s attempts at subduing them in a not-so-gentle or just completely awkward ‘as seen on tv’ fashion.  The side effects of implementing a technique that one does not understand fully are very real and often result in feeding aggressive behavior rather than taming it – especially when the treatment is physically restraining, painful, or shocking to the dog.

When a trainer works with your dog, they should be taking into consideration the dog’s natural breed tendencies and needs, the dog’s history, the dog’s current living environment, and the expectations and relationships that are expected from the dog’s human family.  Only then should any type of behavior modification program take place.   This is the value of having a trainer in your home: they can observe all of this first.  There is no one-size-fits-all formula for training a dog – especially when you are dealing with behavioral issues:  human or canine.   It may not make for entertaining television, but anyone who says differently is selling something.