Come Together: Unite Around Shared Dogmanship Values

Creating a welcoming space on our social media and blog is incredibly important to me. I initially started our cattle dog’s Instagram account as a personal journal more than anything else, but I quickly realized how amazing it is to connect with other owners.

And the best connections? They come from openness, from kindness, from embracing what we have in common as a foundation to productively discuss our differences.

Here are my thoughts on how we — dog owners, dog trainers, pet industry professionals, people who just love animals — can do better for the creatures in our care. I’d love to see us unite around shared values more than we fixate on disagreements.

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Dog owners and trainers argue about so many things

Seriously, so many things. Like:

• What dog training tools are okay to use
• How we walk our dogs (in heel position or sniffing around)
• If all applications of punishment are inherently abusive (or even okay to talk about)
• Operant conditioning, classical conditioning, and other learning theories
• Where we should get our dogs (shelters, rescues, breeders…)
• The role of nature and nurture
• What food our dogs should eat
• If (and when) crates are okay to use
• And more

Sometimes all the different contradictory voices can feel really overwhelming.

And it’s okay to disagree!

There’s nothing wrong with having big feelings and initial reactions and strong opinions. It’s okay to care about “small” things (and embrace that everyone will define small- and big-ticket items differently). We don’t need to hold hands and sing songs every second of the day — there’s tons of value in entertaining different viewpoints and hearing new perspectives.

I’m not looking for boring homogeny, I promise.

But let’s remember that we’re on the same team

While disagreements can lead to productive conversations, they can also turn nasty — and that’s the part I’d like to see less of.

At the end of the day, I think most reasonable voices in the dog training community actually agree on more than we disagree. I see us not as opposing “sides” but rather as fundamentally on the same team: the team of caring about our dogs and wanting to do right by them.

Most invested dog owners I know share so many values

I think the majority of us are united in wanting to:

• Have fun with our dogs
• Keep our pets safe
• Be respectful to the world around us
• Earn our companions’ trust

Even if we don’t act on those values in the same ways — even if we make different decisions for our individual lifestyles — we share the same core principles.

We make more of an overall impact working together

And if we really care about what we say we do — that is, the wellbeing of canines and quality of our human relationships with them — being self-righteous on the internet is not the way.

Is the use of a specific tool or the semantics of certain terms or the types of play we engage in really where we draw the line between “good quality of life” and “abuse”?

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Instead of above-average owners* getting fired up to the point of hostility over the relatively small percentage of things we disagree on, what if we pooled our efforts to bump up general canine education and quality of life overall?

^{(* Forgive me the assumption that those of us in the online dog community are likely more invested in our pets than average to help make the point.)}

How do we decide what we really care about?

Sometimes I think of this idea in number terms to illustrate the point:

• Dog A’s quality of life is an 8/10.
• Dog B’s quality of life is a 3/10.
• If I really care about overall canine wellbeing, I want to put my resources into helping Dog B go up from a three.
• While it would also be amazing to take Dog A from eight to ten (and that small incremental change is absolutely something we can work towards!) I want the bulk of my energy to go where it makes the most difference.

I often think many (not all, but many) dog training “hot topics” are things that exist between eight to ten.

An owner who loves her dog, is trying her best, and asks questions to learn is probably giving her pets a pretty decent quality of life to start with. I could latch onto a few things I don’t like that I believe might take that quality of life number even higher than a seven or eight… but now we’re in the land of diminishing returns.

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To be clear: I am not trying to say that marginal returns don’t or can’t matter! I love optimizing as much as possible in my life with Scout. It’s just that on a grand scale, focusing on certain details doesn’t have the biggest impact so many of us claim we want to make.

Another example:

• A dog who gets appropriate biological fulfillment and social time with his owners is doing pretty well in the large scheme of things… even if food is sometimes used to create pressure in training in a way I don’t personally love.
• Versus a dog who is fundamentally deprived of basic needs with very little enrichment. That’s where I’d like to channel my energy and education off the bat!
• It’s not that the first dog doesn’t matter or that his life couldn’t be improved in some ways. (Just because something isn’t awful doesn’t automatically mean it’s amazing, and that can be a slippery slope.)
• But there is middle ground between “there are bigger frisbees to catch right now” and “total complacency”.

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My “big-ticket” items to focus on

Outright abuse and neglect

I want to devote most of my resources to preventing and addressing actual abuse.

I’m not talking about subtle equipment placement or generalizations about training tools — I mean dogs who are being actively hurt by their relationships with humans. Dogs who are deprived of basic needs, who are treated like objects, who are physically or mentally unwell because of their environments.

(Again: I’m not saying that just because something isn’t awful means it’s amazing. Just that I want the majority of my effort to go to grand-scheme improvements. As we address those, we can continue to optimize down the line!)

High-level owner education

While there are absolutely some cruel people out there, I think a lot of abuse and neglect happen due to ignorance. Not because people don’t care, but because they truly don’t know better.

So many pets’ lives would improve with greater common knowledge about:

• How our dogs experience the world (their senses, what we know of their cognition)
• What activities are natural and fulfilling for our dogs
• Canine body language
• Roles of both nature and nurture
• Potential impacts of getting a dog from a shelter vs a breeder
• How much time a dog will truly need from us
• And so on

Access to resources

Tied directly into abuse and ignorance is accessibility: both access to educational content itself and access to the resources to act on that information.

Pet welfare is correlated with human welfare. By addressing larger societal inequalities, we can improve the lives of people and their companion animals together instead of villainizing good hearts doing their best with what they have. I particularly enjoyed how Bronwen Dickey addressed this topic in her Pit Bull book.

I think we’d do well to try to increase access to veterinary care, short-term foster options to help owners keep possession of their pets through housing problems, and so on.

What other things would you add to your big-ticket item list?

The above is me thinking about what most comes to mind when I imagine dogs and humans living better together. I’d love to hear your own thoughts!

Let’s make life better, together

So I’ve been thinking it for a while, and then overthinking, and then feeling a mixed jumble of things because life and communication are messy… but I am just going to say it.

If you:

• spend time attacking people who have their dogs’ best interests at heart because they don’t do everything the same way you do,
• shout “abuse” at the smallest sign of stress in a short video clip without asking any clarifying questions,
• villainize owners putting heart and soul into their dogs’ growth because of occasional mistakes,
• compare thoughtful use of a given training tool to physical mutilation or beating,
• mock and belittle and condescend instead of trying to have a productive conversation,

you are making life worse — for both humans and dogs — not making it better. If you love your dog, if you’re trying, if you’re doing your best, you’re welcome here. Now go play a fun game 😁