The Dogs Deserve Better Than This: Why Dog Training Has a Tribalism Problem

I think one of the biggest injustices we do to dogs is turning every discussion about training into a battle between people rather than a conversation about the dogs themselves.

We seem to have reached a point where if you don't immediately pick a side, you're treated as the enemy. Trainers spend more time attacking one another than helping owners understand the animal in front of them.

The irony is that both sides often rely on exactly the same caricatures.

Force free trainers get painted as people who think dogs are babies, that boundaries don't exist, that dogs should never hear the word no, and that all training can be solved by waving a handful of chicken around.

Traditional trainers get painted as people who want to dominate dogs, intimidate them and punish them into submission.

Neither description reflects reality.

The problem is that once these caricatures take hold, they become easier to argue against than the actual methods being discussed.

Take the claim that force free training cannot produce high level working dogs because historically more successful competition dogs have been trained using aversive methods.

That sounds convincing until you look at it more closely.

For decades, traditional and aversive training methods were the dominant approach. Naturally, the majority of successful competition dogs came through those systems because the overwhelming majority of dogs entered into those systems were trained that way.

That doesn't prove those methods are superior.

It proves they were more common.

To demonstrate superiority, you would need meaningful comparisons between training approaches, applied consistently across large groups of dogs and measured over time. We simply don't have that.

What we do have are people pointing to successful dogs and assuming the method was the reason for the success.

Those are not the same thing.

The same issue appears when people point to declining standards in pet dogs and suggest force free training is responsible.

There probably are more poorly behaved dogs in homes than many trainers remember. But there are also more dogs in homes than ever before. There are more working bred dogs being sold into pet homes.

There is more training information available online than at any point in history. There is more contradictory advice than ever before. And there is still no meaningful regulation of the industry.

Most owners are not following a force free training programme. Most owners are not following a balanced training programme either. They're watching videos from ten different trainers, taking advice from social media, trying a mixture of techniques, becoming overwhelmed and then wondering why nothing feels consistent.

That isn't a force free problem.

That isn't a balanced training problem.

It's a dog training industry problem.

I also think we need to move beyond the idea that dogs are either simple creatures that just need telling what to do or furry children who should never experience frustration.

Both positions miss the point.

Dogs are intelligent social animals. They form relationships. They experience emotions. They learn from consequences. They have needs, motivations and preferences. Recognising that doesn't mean treating them like people.

It means treating them like dogs.

What frustrates me most is that discussions about training often become exercises in oversimplification.

• Force free training gets reduced to "just use food".

• Traditional training gets reduced to "just punish the dog".

Neither description is remotely accurate.

• No serious trainer believes training is that simple.

• No serious trainer believes dogs learn without boundaries.

• No serious trainer believes food alone is enough to train a working dog.

Yet those arguments continue to get repeated because they are easier to attack than what trainers are actually doing.

The result is an industry that spends more time defending labels than examining outcomes.

And while trainers argue about camps and identities, owners are left trying to navigate an unregulated profession full of conflicting information, strong personalities and very little agreement.

The dogs deserve better than that.