Should you look for dog training advice online?
I say this as a person who gives dog training advice online – No
That’s it, that’s the post…you may carry on with your day.
Just kidding! No, but seriously there are very few reasons you should only be searching for dog training advice online.
- You got/getting a new dog or puppy and need help with toilet training, recall etc. i.e. basic training
- You have arranged for a trainer to help but they are not coming until next week/month so you need some management techniques until that time.
- You are interested in learning more about dog training and are doing research by watching/reading about trainers to know more about their courses or techniques.
- You enjoy watching people train dogs
Thats it. Those are the only 4 reasons you should be looking up dog training online.
Many trainers that show their work online, in a TikTok or Youtube video, will show very specific moments of the training that make them look good and make you either want to buy their merch, course or book them for training. I have also often seen vital information cut out of their videos so that someone attempting the training at home based on the video will get it wrong, and potentially damage their relationship with their dog. TikTik Trainers often guarantee a behaviour and promise that you’ll love the results you get with minimal effort. These trainers are capitalising on lazy dog owners who want an easy way out. These people will get drawn in by the quick results as they will not want to continue training the dog after the course is over. Any trainer that “guarantees” a certain behaviour is a RED FLAG!
Sorry to break it to you but that’s not how dog training works. Dog training is consistent and forever. As a responsible owner, you should always be working with and reinforcing behaviours you want from your dog. This means that you cannot send your dog off on a 2-week residential training course and then never have to do any training with them ever again.
There’s a reason the “A Dog is for Life not just for Christmas” slogan from Dogs Trust is so true. A dog needs constant care and training from the time you bring them home to the time they cross the rainbow bridge a 15-20-year commitment.
I think one of the issues with the dog training world these days is that is it completely unregulated, you do not need to have a qualification or be registered anywhere to say you are a dog trainer or behaviourist, you barely need to have trained a dog before! As long as you can convince people you know what you are talking about then you can be a dog trainer. ~ I’ll write a post about what to look for in a good trainer in the future as that deserves the time and effort of its own post not to be shoehorned in here.~ It’s even easier to convince people online that you know what you’re talking about, all it takes is a few fancy words (that you don’t even need to know how to pronounce because you typed it) and hey presto you convince a bunch of people you’re a dog trainer.
How many of you had a look around this site to see if I knew what I was talking about? Checked to see if I had any qualifications? Have I ever worked with or trained a dog before? I’d be willing to bet not a lot, you were just quite happy to go along with what I told you. Some of you might have had a look afterwards but as long as I didn’t tell you something ridiculous like if you brush a golden retriever’s fur in a certain way while singing a song it glows like in Tangled, you would have been quite happy to believe everything I said.
Well, lucky for you I do have some qualifications and I have worked with and trained dogs so, I do, to an extent, know what I am talking about but I by no means know everything. No one does (don’t let them fool you). If you see a piece of training advice online and can’t find a second or third source to back it up…probably a load of hooey. Don’t get me wrong, it might not be, the dog training industry is forever changing and coming up with new techniques that might not have made it to mainstream training yet. Just look at how long it took for clicker training to catch on with a lot of the big-name trainers at the time as they all thought it was just a bit of a gimmick.
But with how fast information travels these days I reckon you would be hard-pressed to find a technique that hasn’t been tried by at least one other person and put on social media. Nothing stays secret for long these days.
TV trainers aren’t helping the situation either. I understand that no one wants to watch hours upon hours of a dog being trained to do the same thing over and over until they have it trained enough to show a “finished result” to the viewers. But maybe a transition screen of how many hours they sat there doing that, just to give the average dog owner watching the show an idea of how long it takes. The one thing I have seen – because production and editing take so long – is that many of these shows can go back to the people/dogs they have trained to see what the dog is like weeks or months down the line. I have seen a few of these where the people admitted that it is still a work in progress and they have good days and bad days. This narrative does help to get across the fact that training a dog does not happen quickly. But the main story of these shows is that the trainer comes in spends an hour or so with the family and then leaves, never to be seen again but the dog is “fixed”.
For anything that requires more than a rudimentary level of understanding of dog training such as working with problem behaviours like guarding or separation anxiety, it is best to contact a local trainer and get them to help you in person. Each dog is unique and therefore there is no cookie-cutter solution for many behavioural problems, this is where having a trainer observe the behaviour and craft a bespoke training plan for the dog can help. The trainer can also make the call that if a particular method is not working then it’s time to try something else.
Training dogs is not easy but can very easily be messed up by a person who does not know what they are doing. This is why a trainer with a lot of experience can charge more than a trainer who is new to the industry. This is also why it is usually the trainers who have been in the industry for a long time have specialisations in certain behaviours, this means they have worked with many different dogs showing this behaviour and are therefore best equipped to help you with the same behavioural problem.
Trainer will also often have a network with each other, this means that if they are not able to help you with their current skill set they will either contact someone else for advice or refer you on to someone who can help you.
Long story short, online sources can be useful in certain cases but they should by no means be the only source of information you should use.
The Dog Standard 