Used to be there was only one way, but that’s no longer the case. It’s really no different from the fact that I want to know what’s in the food I buy for my dog so I can make my OWN decision as an informed consumer. When it comes to deciding whose training services I am going to buy, I also want to know what a trainer is going to be doing with me and my dog so that I can make my own decision as an informed consumer. (Again - leaving aside whatever might have been said in Ms. McCullough’s article - which I have not read - and commenting only on the consumer’s right to know that choices exist for them to make.)

I’d never heard of the writer of the article on “how to choose a dog trainer,” but it certainly read like the work of someone with an agenda to advance, not a piece of helpful and well-researched journalism. Now I get it.

In that article, as I recall, Ms. McCullough did not advise people to find a trainer whose philosophy and methods aligned with their own. She told them which philosophies and methods and tools were the correct ones, and how to find a “trainer” who would parrot those back. Nevermind the wee detail of whether the dog gets trained. Nevermind whether the Emperor has any clothes, in the person of a well-trained personal dog or six. Are we convincing ourselves that we are having “fun?”

As a results-oriented trainer who does not share Ms. McCullough’s favored “philosophy,” has little use for warmed-over Skinnerian “learning theory,” refuses to join the “professional” organization she endorses, and is not a slave to any method or tool, perhaps I could be justifiably counted among the injured parties. But the boilerplate article was not important enough to dwell on. It’s sad that readers are being fed the same old same old, instead of solid advice, but most of us grownups are resigned to seeing more mediocrity than substance, and we move on, doing our best to provide the latter.

I find it telling that, four years on, Ms. McCullough is still nursing the hurt of having been unceremoniously alpha rolled (Oh — is that not PC? Dogs don’t *do* that?) by a better writer who also happens to understand dogs, and those who train them.

I find that a lot, though — creatures who live without the benefit of correction are awfully sulky when they finally receive one from the world.

(Full disclosure. I consider Mr. McCaig a friend. He did not win my professional admiration or personal esteem by praising me or cutting me any slack. Quite the opposite.)

Yup, well said.

I don’t think those are the implications of his letter at all. I think the implications of his letter are that many people can talk a good game, but results are a better measure of their worth.

h t t p://www.clickertraining.com/node/988
(take out the spaces)