What is Balanced Dog Training? (A story about baked potatoes)
By Alexis Weaver, Lead Trainer, Skyline K9
I don’t like aligning myself with “tribes.” I didn’t eat meat for seven years. When people asked, saying I was vegetarian got my point across most efficiently. But putting myself in the vegetarian box opened me up to being “exposed” for not conforming to the vegetarian “playbook” to the letter. For instance, I still ate Cesar salad dressing even though it had a dash of anchovies. I ate a baked potato with pork gravy once when a very thoughtful colleague brought me lunch on a busy day and I didn’t have the heart to refuse the gesture. True vegetarians would criticize me for my choices, and non-vegetarians (such as my own brother 😄) would use it as proof of my own hypocrisy and evidence that vegetarianism doesn’t work.
In reality, I was being thoughtful about my own food choices. I chose what worked best for me. I didn’t agree with everything "vegetarian,” but I did use the term to signal my general eating habits quickly and effectively to outsiders.
Balanced training, positive-reinforcement only training - they’re just tribes in dog training form. Just like I used to label myself as vegetarian to create a quick distinction from the meat eaters, I label myself as a balanced dog trainer to create a quick distinction from the positive reinforcement-only trainers. It’s not my favorite thing, but I do this so owners only looking to train with positive reinforcement can quickly scroll the other way, and people who are interested have the opportunity to dive a little deeper.
Simply put, balanced training is training that involves saying both “yes” and “no” to your dog. This is different from positive reinforcement-only training, which involves only saying “yes".
Positive reinforcement is an integral component of balanced training. I love rewarding dogs for doing great things! If the dog in front of me is showing me nothing but perfect angel-ness, I’ll give him all the treats and toys and praise in the world. But rewards have their limitations. What if that dog decides to jump up on your elderly neighbor, guards his toys from the kids, barks his head off at the front door? Do we try to entice him with treats to make the right choices (likely reinforcing the unwanted behavior anyway)? Or do we show him, quickly and fairly, which behaviors are not going to fly, and then continue on with all the good stuff?
I prefer the latter option. If we reward our dogs for doing great things and correct them for doing not-so-great things, we give our dogs the clearest picture possible about what is expected of them.
In addition to food, toys, and praise, many balanced trainers also use tools such as prong collars and e-collars. There are so many misconceptions about these tools - that they hurt dogs, that they’re inhumane. I stared out a staunch opponent to these tools, but I kept an open mind. People who I thought very highly of were using them in their training, which intrigued me. I saw and felt that the prong collar doesn’t actually pinch, that the e-collar doesn’t actually shock. I saw, even so, how gently these trainers were using them, and how well the dogs were responding. I’ve since adopted prong and e-collar training into my own training methods, and I’ve seen dramatic results. You can read more about these tools in my other posts: Demystifying the Prong Collar and Why We’re HUGE Advocates of E-Collar Training.
If you’ve been training your dog with positive reinforcement-only methods, and you’re not afraid to slip a (metaphorical) baked potato in there, feel free to reach out - you might be surprised at the difference it makes!
