Dangerous Doggy Fairy Tales

Trainers often spend a lot of time "discussing" various methods and techniques when it comes to working with dogs and their owners. Sometimes these discussions get heated, and sometimes they bring new understanding.

While these discussions are fine among trainers, a huge concern for many professionals is how half-truths, misinformation and down right myths leak into the general public and become accepted as fact. Even more annoying is when so-called professionals repeat this information as fact.

The dangerous part of these fairly tales being passed around as truth is that dogs are often subjected to ineffective, confusing training at best, and actual cruelty at worst. Take my father's belief that "there is something about newspaper that dogs don't like" as his reason for swatting a dog with one if the dog pees on the carpet. Not only does the dog receive less than impressive house training, he is also taught to fear his owner and possibly newspapers. But this is "how it's always been done" and trying to explain to my dad that the newspaper holds no special powers is a difficult task.

Some things are less dangerous and just misunderstood. Many of my clients ask me why their dog "has" to walk on their left side. I explain to them that unless they are doing competition obedience or they carry a gun on their right side during walks, it really doesn't matter where the dog walks. The tradition of having a dog walk on the left side was started with soldiers who carried their guns on the right.

As for the more serious fallacies, I've decided it would be silly to reinvent the wheel, when Jean Donadson has done such a fine job of dispelling myths with this recent article: http://ca.lifestyle.yahoo.com/pets/dogs/articles/e/behaviour-training/do...