00:00:02 Speaker 1: 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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. 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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.