September 24, 2025 • 17 mins
This week, Tony talks about force-free versus balanced training, and the different ways we can mold our dogs into well-behaved companions.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, everyone, welcome to the Foundation's podcast. I'm your host
Tony Peterson. Today's episode is all about training styles and
how to decide what is right for you and your dog.
This one's going to be kind of a fun one.
It'll probably piss some people off, though. I don't know
how to talk about the difference in training styles and
(00:24):
not have that be the result, so I guess just
doesn't really matter. The thing is, there are a lot
of different ways to train a dog, and one might
really resonate with you, or more importantly, might really be
what's necessary for your specific dog. So buckle up because
that's what I'm going to talk about right now. One
(00:47):
of the weirdest things that has happened to me is
that I realized how much I like to coach sports teams.
I guess I should explain that better. I really enjoyed
coaching my daughters on their sports teams up until they
got a little too good for my skill level and
my travel schedule made it almost impossible to really commit
to the gig. But for several years there wasn't a
softball or basketball team they were on that I wasn't
(01:10):
at least an assistant coach. For It was a lot
of fun. It was also really eye opening because I
got to see how different parenting styles create different types
of players. And anyone who knows anything about coaching knows
that the best thing you can get when you know
the kids are young and not very good is just
one that's coachable. They are all terrible athletes, with usually
(01:34):
almost no understanding of the game in general, or even
the rules, or about anything that has to do with
the sports that we enroll them into. But that's okay.
You can be a terrible, you know, athlete when you're eight.
It doesn't matter. What does matter is whether you have
the ability to take suggestions from your coach and then
actually kind of try to see them through. The kids
(01:56):
who did and who can tend to have parents who
enforce those behaviors in moments when they could go either way.
Now that might sound harsh, but hear me out. During
our last tournament of our Springs Sopall League, my daughter's
team made it to the championship game. This isn't really
a big deal to anyone, but it was to the girls.
It was a long weekend of playing games in the
(02:16):
summer heat, but it was also fun to get them
psyched up to try to win first place trophies. Except
that twenty minutes before the game started, one of our
players and her mom walked up to us, and the
mom sheepishly said, she's not feeling it, so she's not
going to play. Now, keep in mind, this girl wasn't sick.
She didn't take a cleat to the throat in a
previous game, you know, nothing like that. She just decided
(02:40):
she didn't want to play in the last game with
her team that she agreed to play with because she
wasn't feeling it. I wish I could say that I
couldn't believe it, but I could believe it. She wasn't
really coachable to begin with, and her giving up on
the team didn't come as a huge surprise. Now, it's
easy for me to judge someone else's parenting style while
not having someone judge mine, at least outwardly on a
(03:01):
podcast that you know thousands of people listen to. But
there is a lesson in there for all of us
who train our dogs. Parenting styles, coaching styles, and dog
training styles all require the same kind of inputs and outputs.
Too soft and you'll get a kid or a canine
that'll walk all over you too hard and you'll get
a kid, or a canine that lives in fear, and
(03:23):
that's no bueno. So there has to be a balance
in there somewhere. And I recently went down a rabbit
hole on readed about this very thing. The topic was
force free training versus balanced. Now, if you're unfamiliar, force
free training is basically teaching a dog without using pain, intimidation, threats, force,
or coercion. It is an attempt to be positive or
(03:44):
neutral at all times. Balance training utilizes not only reward
based techniques like treats and praise and some playtime, but
also aversive techniques or corrections think leash pops, pron callers
or E callers. Here you can break things down further
to positive reinforcement like giving your puppet treat when it
(04:04):
lays down on command, or negative reinforcement like using an
e caller to correct a dog that jumps up on someone.
Got positive punishment too, you know, giving your dog a
leash pop when it pulls too hard when you're teaching
it to walk out your side, and then you have
negative punishment like ignoring your dog when it nuzzles up
to you and tries to make you pet it because
then it's in control. There are a lot of ways
(04:25):
to skin the old cat here, I guess. But let's
back up a second to the force free training technique.
This is a popular one, and as you can imagine
with the fur baby movement out there, it's only getting
more popular in the broader population, even if it hasn't
really caught on a whole lot with working dogs and
sporting dogs for reasons i'll get into. When I started
looking into force free trainers and what they do, the
(04:48):
first video that popped up explaining the whole thing showed
a woman sitting on a couch who said that an
easy way to understand this style is to think of
training a puppy to sit. Balance training involves pushing the
rump of that puppy to the ground while giving it
the sick command. She said, they don't force the dog
to do anything, And I thought, well, how the hell
(05:08):
do you get a puppy to sit then, or how
do you train it to sit if you're waiting for
a dog to choose to sit for you, especially when
that dog is an eight week old puppy. She never
explained it. Now I also thought, I don't know how
many dogs are going to take offense to you pushing
their rump down and then immediately giving them a treat.
But maybe I'm just a balanced trainer at heart. Now,
(05:28):
I don't want to sound like I'm totally dismissing the
force free idea, because I'm not. It's a great idea,
it's just not something that is all that easy to
actually implement in the real world with real dogs, especially
dogs are going to have a job. It's an idea
that promises respect for the animal looks amazing on paper,
and I'm sure with the right person who has enough time,
can be super effective. I also think it's probably totally
(05:52):
bullshit that anyone who is training dogs totally force free
and achieving really good results in a reasonable timeline is
actually telling you the truth. But I guess that also
depends on what the dog is being trained to do,
so I'm probably wrong there. I like the idea of
positive reinforcement a lot, as most of us probably do.
I just don't know if a dog that is being
(06:13):
asked to go into the wild places I go and
encounter the wild things I do, you know, including traffic
and barberare fences and all the other shit that you
know might hurt them can really be prepared for that
world without any type of correction in training whatsoever. I
also know that the balance training thing can get out
of hand too. One of the first articles I wrote
(06:33):
for meat Eaters several years ago was about whether e
callers are necessary for all bird dogs. I've written a
lot of stuff that has pissed off a lot of people,
but that one was definitely in my top ten. Boy
did they come after me. It was interesting because I
didn't say that e callers shouldn't be used. I just
said that they should be used correctly, and that not
(06:54):
every bird dog out there needs an e caller to
be great, you know, to be a well behind dog
that knows the rules. In the sporting dog world, though,
there is an acceptance of e callers that is damn
near ubiquitous, and you're definitely in the minority if you
don't use them. And I don't use them on my dogs,
although I have in the past. I just realized that
I don't really need to, and I didn't want to
(07:16):
crutch that could run out of batteries when I was
in the field, so I went for dogs that might
not need an e caller or training. I like dogs
with tons of hunting drive that should also be really
soft to handle, which is generally what I look for.
And I also have a lot of time to train them,
and it's somewhat part of my job to do that.
I don't need super fast results, like a bird dog
(07:37):
trainer who's going to see you know, fifty or sixty
dogs in a year and has to get predictable results
in a specific time window, and who then is going
to hand a dog off to someone who isn't super
comfortable training dogs in the first place. So this stuff
is muddy, and one thing that doesn't do us any
favors is to glom onto or you know, identify too
tightly with something that won't allow us to be reasonable.
(08:12):
Think about it this way. What if you're an adherent
to totally force free training and you get a sweet
little female lab who only wants to please you. You
can treat train use positive reinforcement, and if you raise
your voice slightly, your dog will heal up immediately and
look you in the eyes to apologize. In that case,
you might feel like force free is not only the
easiest way to get the best results. It's the only
(08:34):
responsible type of training anyone could do. Then you get
your second dog, maybe even from the same breeder, but
this one has a little bit more horsepower and you
have a lot more work to do. You know, maybe
a couple of youngsters at home that keep you from
training as much. Will that training style work here? Maybe,
but probably not, because this stuff is highly situational and
(08:57):
it goes a lot of different ways. You might train
a dog with a prong caller or an e coller
that just needs a heavier hand due to a really
independent spirit and a willingness to test you at every
chance it can. Maybe you have a Chessie or some
other breed just known for being its own dog. Force
free in that situation might be a total disaster for
you and for the dog. So you correct appropriately and
(09:21):
the dog learns to listen, even if it wants mostly
to do its own thing. That's great. But then your
next dog isn't a Chessie, it's a softer breed like,
I don't know, a Golden Retriever or something. A correction
with that dog on the e caller that's twenty percent
of what your CHESSI could handle might shut it down
completely and totally erode the trust you have with it.
(09:42):
So what is a dog owner to do? Well? You do,
you boo. But I think there's sort of an escalatory
reality to training dogs like there is to raising kids.
You can't spank your kids anymore, which, if you talk
to a middle school teacher who has been in the
game a while, might not be helped us produce you know,
polite go getters who are going to be a net
(10:03):
benefit to society. They might have a few opinions on that.
Today's punishment might be more likely. You know, I'm going
to take your phone away or change the Wi Fi
password for a day or two. Who knows. But it
usually starts with a vague threat, then a more serious threat,
and then finally some type of action or I guess correction.
With dogs, it's generally a good idea to reward them
(10:26):
if that'll work. If not, you give them the chance
to make a better decision. I'll give you an example here.
I don't force fetch my dogs, which left a trainer
friend of mine astonished when I told him. He said, well,
how do you get him to retrieve the hand and
hold onto a bumper or anything else? I said, well,
my dogs love to retrieve more than anything in the world,
(10:47):
and we are training and they spit it early or
they don't follow through. When I know they know what
they are supposed to do, I stop the retrieving. I
take the bumper away at the end of the session.
It usually doesn't take long before they figure it out.
That might be a one minute break when they're young,
or if they are old and really know their stuff,
the session might end for the day. Either way, the
message is that you're in control of the retrieves and
(11:09):
if you want more, you have to follow the rules
that have been established. The process involves stepping up the punishment,
but mostly giving them a chance to control whether they
get the punishment at all or not. Most of dog
training is like that, and the best trainers who use
e crawlers usually are pretty quick to say that it's
mostly just a reinforcement tool when they can issue a
(11:30):
long distance reminder on what to do before they actually
escalate from tone or vibrate to a shock. But even
before this, you have to learn your dog and what
it needs. Just like how some kids show up to
play softball because they inherently want to and they understand
the dynamics of team sports, while others will just bail
on a whim. Dogs have different personalities. I owned a
(11:53):
golden retriever who I probably could have trained to drive
a car with just enough praise. She loved it, and
I got her to do all kinds of stuff just
from getting her excited and offering up some belly rubs.
That dog was easy to train because all she wanted
to do was be with me and make me happy.
Then you take my older lab, Luna. She was never
(12:15):
liked that. She never cared all that much about getting
love for me, and instead just wanted to always work.
Her reward was another retrieve or another drill of some sort,
and of course, if she could get it another hunt.
She couldn't get enough of that stuff. And while on
paper she should have thrived on praise being a female lab,
it didn't matter. She just wanted the next thing to
(12:36):
happen for her. That meant she could run down a
bumper or a rooster, or swim them down you know,
a bumper or a duck whatever. She also decided that
there were a few things in life worth getting punished over,
including chasing turkeys, which is something I think I couldn't
have beaten out of her with a crowbar if I
had wanted to. I didn't, and I don't use crowbars
to train dogs, So please don't reach out with death threats.
(12:59):
I'm being facetious here, But the lesson there is that
two female dogs of breeds that are generally thought of
as being people pleasers who could probably be trained to be,
you know, really really good with just treats and praise,
still require different training styles. If you know what to
look for, you can see how this might play out
when they are pretty young, so young, in fact, that
(13:21):
your breeder might be able to tell you which puppies
will be easy to train and which ones won't, or
at least which ones seem a little more stubborn or
hard handed or independent or whatever. And by the time
you get them home and spend a little time with them,
you can see what styles of training you might want
to lean into. I think that is the key here.
But there is one last point I want to make.
(13:42):
It's easy to give a dog a lot of freedom,
but that comes with some risk. I see this a
lot when I'm out for runs or working my dogs
in neighborhood parks. The amount of off leash dogs that
completely ignore their owners as bonkers, and while it's annoying
to me when I'm out on a run, it's also
really dangerous for them. Dog Dogs thrive on structure and
(14:03):
having jobs and knowing their role, and I firmly believe
this is partially due to being pack animals that you know,
and all the stuff that comes with that, but also
just due to their coevolution with us. They have had
to earn their keep for thousands of years, and it's
not a bad thing to ask them to keep doing that.
In fact, it's a good thing. They need it, you know,
(14:26):
And in the right structure they absolutely thrive. Just needs
to be fair and almost entirely positive. But that doesn't
mean there isn't room for a correction ever. I know
some folks disagree with this, but in our world, a
dog that doesn't really know the word no is a
dog that will eventually get a face full of porcupine
quills or might become a hood ornament for a garbage
(14:48):
truck in those instances, or a more common one where
a dog that is trusted to make good choices on
its own runs up to a dog that would just
as soon kill other dogs as sniffets, but you know
they might end up injured, are dead if it doesn't
understand recall and the consequences of not listening again. You
can damn near get away with ninety nine percent positive training.
(15:10):
But if your dog doesn't truly understand that it needs
to stay when you ask it to, or to return
when you tell it to, or whatever, the likelihood of
something going wrong is real, and if it does, it'll
be a hell of a lot worse than a leash
pop or a light zap with the e caller. Now,
let me make this clear. I'm not advocating that you
train one way or another because I don't know you
(15:31):
or your dog. You know you and you know your dog,
and being aware of different training styles and techniques and
philosophies can guide you to the right moves with your
dog so that not only will you have a well behaved,
for legged buddy, you'll be able to keep them safe
in a variety of dynamic environments. Take from that what
you will and stay safe out there if you're getting
(15:53):
after the docks or grouse or what cocker, sharp tails
or whatever, that's it. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been
the Foundation's podcast. As always, thank you so much for listening.
Thank you for all of your support all of us
here at meat Eater, We truly appreciate it. We're in
the heart of hunting season right now, so maybe you
(16:14):
need a I don't know, a new recipe to cook
up some roosters. Maybe you just want to kill some
time when you're driving to South Dakota or wherever to hunt.
We drop new podcasts, new films, and new articles every
day at the medeater dot com. So much information there,
(16:35):
so much to consume. Some of its entertainment, some of
its education, a lot of it's a mix of both,
but we covered tons of different topics. Adventure hunts, close
to home, public land hunts, you name it, go check
it out at the meadeater dot com.
Hey, everyone, welcome to the Foundation's podcast. I'm your host
Tony Peterson. Today's episode is all about training styles and
how to decide what is right for you and your dog.
This one's going to be kind of a fun one.
It'll probably piss some people off, though. I don't know
how to talk about the difference in training styles and
(00:24):
not have that be the result, so I guess just
doesn't really matter. The thing is, there are a lot
of different ways to train a dog, and one might
really resonate with you, or more importantly, might really be
what's necessary for your specific dog. So buckle up because
that's what I'm going to talk about right now. One
(00:47):
of the weirdest things that has happened to me is
that I realized how much I like to coach sports teams.
I guess I should explain that better. I really enjoyed
coaching my daughters on their sports teams up until they
got a little too good for my skill level and
my travel schedule made it almost impossible to really commit
to the gig. But for several years there wasn't a
softball or basketball team they were on that I wasn't
(01:10):
at least an assistant coach. For It was a lot
of fun. It was also really eye opening because I
got to see how different parenting styles create different types
of players. And anyone who knows anything about coaching knows
that the best thing you can get when you know
the kids are young and not very good is just
one that's coachable. They are all terrible athletes, with usually
(01:34):
almost no understanding of the game in general, or even
the rules, or about anything that has to do with
the sports that we enroll them into. But that's okay.
You can be a terrible, you know, athlete when you're eight.
It doesn't matter. What does matter is whether you have
the ability to take suggestions from your coach and then
actually kind of try to see them through. The kids
(01:56):
who did and who can tend to have parents who
enforce those behaviors in moments when they could go either way.
Now that might sound harsh, but hear me out. During
our last tournament of our Springs Sopall League, my daughter's
team made it to the championship game. This isn't really
a big deal to anyone, but it was to the girls.
It was a long weekend of playing games in the
(02:16):
summer heat, but it was also fun to get them
psyched up to try to win first place trophies. Except
that twenty minutes before the game started, one of our
players and her mom walked up to us, and the
mom sheepishly said, she's not feeling it, so she's not
going to play. Now, keep in mind, this girl wasn't sick.
She didn't take a cleat to the throat in a
previous game, you know, nothing like that. She just decided
(02:40):
she didn't want to play in the last game with
her team that she agreed to play with because she
wasn't feeling it. I wish I could say that I
couldn't believe it, but I could believe it. She wasn't
really coachable to begin with, and her giving up on
the team didn't come as a huge surprise. Now, it's
easy for me to judge someone else's parenting style while
not having someone judge mine, at least outwardly on a
(03:01):
podcast that you know thousands of people listen to. But
there is a lesson in there for all of us
who train our dogs. Parenting styles, coaching styles, and dog
training styles all require the same kind of inputs and outputs.
Too soft and you'll get a kid or a canine
that'll walk all over you too hard and you'll get
a kid, or a canine that lives in fear, and
(03:23):
that's no bueno. So there has to be a balance
in there somewhere. And I recently went down a rabbit
hole on readed about this very thing. The topic was
force free training versus balanced. Now, if you're unfamiliar, force
free training is basically teaching a dog without using pain, intimidation, threats, force,
or coercion. It is an attempt to be positive or
(03:44):
neutral at all times. Balance training utilizes not only reward
based techniques like treats and praise and some playtime, but
also aversive techniques or corrections think leash pops, pron callers
or E callers. Here you can break things down further
to positive reinforcement like giving your puppet treat when it
(04:04):
lays down on command, or negative reinforcement like using an
e caller to correct a dog that jumps up on someone.
Got positive punishment too, you know, giving your dog a
leash pop when it pulls too hard when you're teaching
it to walk out your side, and then you have
negative punishment like ignoring your dog when it nuzzles up
to you and tries to make you pet it because
then it's in control. There are a lot of ways
(04:25):
to skin the old cat here, I guess. But let's
back up a second to the force free training technique.
This is a popular one, and as you can imagine
with the fur baby movement out there, it's only getting
more popular in the broader population, even if it hasn't
really caught on a whole lot with working dogs and
sporting dogs for reasons i'll get into. When I started
looking into force free trainers and what they do, the
(04:48):
first video that popped up explaining the whole thing showed
a woman sitting on a couch who said that an
easy way to understand this style is to think of
training a puppy to sit. Balance training involves pushing the
rump of that puppy to the ground while giving it
the sick command. She said, they don't force the dog
to do anything, And I thought, well, how the hell
(05:08):
do you get a puppy to sit then, or how
do you train it to sit if you're waiting for
a dog to choose to sit for you, especially when
that dog is an eight week old puppy. She never
explained it. Now I also thought, I don't know how
many dogs are going to take offense to you pushing
their rump down and then immediately giving them a treat.
But maybe I'm just a balanced trainer at heart. Now,
(05:28):
I don't want to sound like I'm totally dismissing the
force free idea, because I'm not. It's a great idea,
it's just not something that is all that easy to
actually implement in the real world with real dogs, especially
dogs are going to have a job. It's an idea
that promises respect for the animal looks amazing on paper,
and I'm sure with the right person who has enough time,
can be super effective. I also think it's probably totally
(05:52):
bullshit that anyone who is training dogs totally force free
and achieving really good results in a reasonable timeline is
actually telling you the truth. But I guess that also
depends on what the dog is being trained to do,
so I'm probably wrong there. I like the idea of
positive reinforcement a lot, as most of us probably do.
I just don't know if a dog that is being
(06:13):
asked to go into the wild places I go and
encounter the wild things I do, you know, including traffic
and barberare fences and all the other shit that you
know might hurt them can really be prepared for that
world without any type of correction in training whatsoever. I
also know that the balance training thing can get out
of hand too. One of the first articles I wrote
(06:33):
for meat Eaters several years ago was about whether e
callers are necessary for all bird dogs. I've written a
lot of stuff that has pissed off a lot of people,
but that one was definitely in my top ten. Boy
did they come after me. It was interesting because I
didn't say that e callers shouldn't be used. I just
said that they should be used correctly, and that not
(06:54):
every bird dog out there needs an e caller to
be great, you know, to be a well behind dog
that knows the rules. In the sporting dog world, though,
there is an acceptance of e callers that is damn
near ubiquitous, and you're definitely in the minority if you
don't use them. And I don't use them on my dogs,
although I have in the past. I just realized that
I don't really need to, and I didn't want to
(07:16):
crutch that could run out of batteries when I was
in the field, so I went for dogs that might
not need an e caller or training. I like dogs
with tons of hunting drive that should also be really
soft to handle, which is generally what I look for.
And I also have a lot of time to train them,
and it's somewhat part of my job to do that.
I don't need super fast results, like a bird dog
(07:37):
trainer who's going to see you know, fifty or sixty
dogs in a year and has to get predictable results
in a specific time window, and who then is going
to hand a dog off to someone who isn't super
comfortable training dogs in the first place. So this stuff
is muddy, and one thing that doesn't do us any
favors is to glom onto or you know, identify too
tightly with something that won't allow us to be reasonable.
(08:12):
Think about it this way. What if you're an adherent
to totally force free training and you get a sweet
little female lab who only wants to please you. You
can treat train use positive reinforcement, and if you raise
your voice slightly, your dog will heal up immediately and
look you in the eyes to apologize. In that case,
you might feel like force free is not only the
easiest way to get the best results. It's the only
(08:34):
responsible type of training anyone could do. Then you get
your second dog, maybe even from the same breeder, but
this one has a little bit more horsepower and you
have a lot more work to do. You know, maybe
a couple of youngsters at home that keep you from
training as much. Will that training style work here? Maybe,
but probably not, because this stuff is highly situational and
(08:57):
it goes a lot of different ways. You might train
a dog with a prong caller or an e coller
that just needs a heavier hand due to a really
independent spirit and a willingness to test you at every
chance it can. Maybe you have a Chessie or some
other breed just known for being its own dog. Force
free in that situation might be a total disaster for
you and for the dog. So you correct appropriately and
(09:21):
the dog learns to listen, even if it wants mostly
to do its own thing. That's great. But then your
next dog isn't a Chessie, it's a softer breed like,
I don't know, a Golden Retriever or something. A correction
with that dog on the e caller that's twenty percent
of what your CHESSI could handle might shut it down
completely and totally erode the trust you have with it.
(09:42):
So what is a dog owner to do? Well? You do,
you boo. But I think there's sort of an escalatory
reality to training dogs like there is to raising kids.
You can't spank your kids anymore, which, if you talk
to a middle school teacher who has been in the
game a while, might not be helped us produce you know,
polite go getters who are going to be a net
(10:03):
benefit to society. They might have a few opinions on that.
Today's punishment might be more likely. You know, I'm going
to take your phone away or change the Wi Fi
password for a day or two. Who knows. But it
usually starts with a vague threat, then a more serious threat,
and then finally some type of action or I guess correction.
With dogs, it's generally a good idea to reward them
(10:26):
if that'll work. If not, you give them the chance
to make a better decision. I'll give you an example here.
I don't force fetch my dogs, which left a trainer
friend of mine astonished when I told him. He said, well,
how do you get him to retrieve the hand and
hold onto a bumper or anything else? I said, well,
my dogs love to retrieve more than anything in the world,
(10:47):
and we are training and they spit it early or
they don't follow through. When I know they know what
they are supposed to do, I stop the retrieving. I
take the bumper away at the end of the session.
It usually doesn't take long before they figure it out.
That might be a one minute break when they're young,
or if they are old and really know their stuff,
the session might end for the day. Either way, the
message is that you're in control of the retrieves and
(11:09):
if you want more, you have to follow the rules
that have been established. The process involves stepping up the punishment,
but mostly giving them a chance to control whether they
get the punishment at all or not. Most of dog
training is like that, and the best trainers who use
e crawlers usually are pretty quick to say that it's
mostly just a reinforcement tool when they can issue a
(11:30):
long distance reminder on what to do before they actually
escalate from tone or vibrate to a shock. But even
before this, you have to learn your dog and what
it needs. Just like how some kids show up to
play softball because they inherently want to and they understand
the dynamics of team sports, while others will just bail
on a whim. Dogs have different personalities. I owned a
(11:53):
golden retriever who I probably could have trained to drive
a car with just enough praise. She loved it, and
I got her to do all kinds of stuff just
from getting her excited and offering up some belly rubs.
That dog was easy to train because all she wanted
to do was be with me and make me happy.
Then you take my older lab, Luna. She was never
(12:15):
liked that. She never cared all that much about getting
love for me, and instead just wanted to always work.
Her reward was another retrieve or another drill of some sort,
and of course, if she could get it another hunt.
She couldn't get enough of that stuff. And while on
paper she should have thrived on praise being a female lab,
it didn't matter. She just wanted the next thing to
(12:36):
happen for her. That meant she could run down a
bumper or a rooster, or swim them down you know,
a bumper or a duck whatever. She also decided that
there were a few things in life worth getting punished over,
including chasing turkeys, which is something I think I couldn't
have beaten out of her with a crowbar if I
had wanted to. I didn't, and I don't use crowbars
to train dogs, So please don't reach out with death threats.
(12:59):
I'm being facetious here, But the lesson there is that
two female dogs of breeds that are generally thought of
as being people pleasers who could probably be trained to be,
you know, really really good with just treats and praise,
still require different training styles. If you know what to
look for, you can see how this might play out
when they are pretty young, so young, in fact, that
(13:21):
your breeder might be able to tell you which puppies
will be easy to train and which ones won't, or
at least which ones seem a little more stubborn or
hard handed or independent or whatever. And by the time
you get them home and spend a little time with them,
you can see what styles of training you might want
to lean into. I think that is the key here.
But there is one last point I want to make.
(13:42):
It's easy to give a dog a lot of freedom,
but that comes with some risk. I see this a
lot when I'm out for runs or working my dogs
in neighborhood parks. The amount of off leash dogs that
completely ignore their owners as bonkers, and while it's annoying
to me when I'm out on a run, it's also
really dangerous for them. Dog Dogs thrive on structure and
(14:03):
having jobs and knowing their role, and I firmly believe
this is partially due to being pack animals that you know,
and all the stuff that comes with that, but also
just due to their coevolution with us. They have had
to earn their keep for thousands of years, and it's
not a bad thing to ask them to keep doing that.
In fact, it's a good thing. They need it, you know,
(14:26):
And in the right structure they absolutely thrive. Just needs
to be fair and almost entirely positive. But that doesn't
mean there isn't room for a correction ever. I know
some folks disagree with this, but in our world, a
dog that doesn't really know the word no is a
dog that will eventually get a face full of porcupine
quills or might become a hood ornament for a garbage
(14:48):
truck in those instances, or a more common one where
a dog that is trusted to make good choices on
its own runs up to a dog that would just
as soon kill other dogs as sniffets, but you know
they might end up injured, are dead if it doesn't
understand recall and the consequences of not listening again. You
can damn near get away with ninety nine percent positive training.
(15:10):
But if your dog doesn't truly understand that it needs
to stay when you ask it to, or to return
when you tell it to, or whatever, the likelihood of
something going wrong is real, and if it does, it'll
be a hell of a lot worse than a leash
pop or a light zap with the e caller. Now,
let me make this clear. I'm not advocating that you
train one way or another because I don't know you
(15:31):
or your dog. You know you and you know your dog,
and being aware of different training styles and techniques and
philosophies can guide you to the right moves with your
dog so that not only will you have a well behaved,
for legged buddy, you'll be able to keep them safe
in a variety of dynamic environments. Take from that what
you will and stay safe out there if you're getting
(15:53):
after the docks or grouse or what cocker, sharp tails
or whatever, that's it. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been
the Foundation's podcast. As always, thank you so much for listening.
Thank you for all of your support all of us
here at meat Eater, We truly appreciate it. We're in
the heart of hunting season right now, so maybe you
(16:14):
need a I don't know, a new recipe to cook
up some roosters. Maybe you just want to kill some
time when you're driving to South Dakota or wherever to hunt.
We drop new podcasts, new films, and new articles every
day at the medeater dot com. So much information there,
(16:35):
so much to consume. Some of its entertainment, some of
its education, a lot of it's a mix of both,
but we covered tons of different topics. Adventure hunts, close
to home, public land hunts, you name it, go check
it out at the meadeater dot com.
Host
Cal Callaghan
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