05 JulHow to tell what methods dog trainers use (and why looking at websites may not be helpful)

Join Anamarie for a presentation on her work on August 8th at 3PM ET. Sign up here. 

When I started working as a dog trainer, I often communicated to clients that, when we ask a dog to do something, we are giving them a “cue.”

“Cue” was not a word I'd grown up hearing in relation to training. As far as I knew, dogs were given “commands.”  (For more on the difference between the terms, you can check out School For The Dogs Podcast, which has addressed the difference between the terms). It may seem like nothing more than industry-specific semantics, but, like many of my training colleagues, when I learned how to train in a force-free manner, I stopped using the word “command” all together, as it suggested forcing or coercing dogs into doing what we want.

Anamarie Johnson, currently a PhD candidate at Arizona State University, is a Certified Professional Dog Trainer who began working for School For The Dogs in 2015.

As a self-identified Positive-Reinforcement trainer, I avoid using punishment and coercion, and the words I use naturally reflect that. I was well aware, however, that there can be a lot of confusion surrounding professional dog trainers and their methods. Language can be a big part of that.

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Cues and Commands

When casually perusing other professional trainers' online or on social media, I found I would form opinions about their methods based on whether they used the word “cue” or the word “command.” I believed that the former tended to indicate that someone was a Positive-Reinforcement trainer — one, like me, who (put simply) makes every effort to create environments where desired behaviors will occur so that we can reinforce those behaviors using food or other desired things. The latter word I thought was more likely to be used by trainers who have fewer qualms about using negative reinforcement and punishment. Positive Reinforcement trainers often refer to those in this other training camp as “Aversive” trainers, but in my experience they are more likely to refer to themselves as “Balanced” trainers (meaning they use a “balance” of reinforcement and punishment — sometimes I've seen that they will say they use “all kinds” of training methods).

However, I wasn't sure that there was any scientific basis for the types of judgements I was making based on the use of these two words. Was this just my personal bias? Or, perhaps there were other buzz words that were more likely to indicate whether a trainer was comfortable using aversive methods or not. Luckily, being a graduate student at Arizona State University allowed me the opportunity to explore my interest. My research on this topic was recently published in the journal, Anthrozoos, in a paper called Training Dogs with Science or with Nature? An Exploration of Trainers’ Word Use, Gender, and Certification Across Dog-Training Methods. 

Parsing The Sites Of The US' Top Dog Trainers

I began this project by looking at the websites of one-hundred dog trainers across the United States — I chose Yelp's ten most highly-reviewed trainers in ten US cities. I then analyzed their sites by looking at specific words, or codes, that related to certain ideas or themes. I also identified the gender of the company’s head trainer, and whether or not they had any certifications. I then tried to document what their training methods were. I mainly looked at company's about pages, FAQ pages, and mission statements. In some cases, I also surveyed photos on the sites for information, or looked at the content of the Yelp reviews.

Even as a trainer with certifications, advanced degrees and over a decade of work in the field under my belt, it was frequently difficult for me to parse whether some of the trainers used, or rejected, force or punishment-based methods of training. Only fifty-six were explicit about identifying what training methods they used; with twenty-two of the businesses I was able to identify the use of aversive methods based on images of electronic or prong collars; twenty-two businesses offered no clear indications on their site, leaving me to work to decipher their methods based on their Yelp reviews.

Sixty-six of the one hundred trainers in my sample had no evidence of professional education or certification. If a trainer did have a certification or a professional education background, they were statistically more likely to be female and use Positive-Reinforcement methods.

When it came to the language used by different trainers, my initial hypothesis — that Positive Reinforcement trainers would use the word “cue” and others would use the word “command” — didn't pan out. Those words were rare in philosophy statements. In fact, I found only one occurrence of these words in a Positive-Reinforcement trainer's statement (it was about the difference between these words) and two instances of the word “cue” on the pages of aversive/balanced trainers who were using it to indicate a signal that is given prior to a correction. The latter is a valid use of the word but not a usage one is likely to find in the lexicon of Positive Reinforcement trainer, as we are unlikely to be instructing clients on how to train using corrections at all.

Nothing Is Clear Cut

I admit that I hoped that there would be some kind of clear word-use case that I'd be able to offer up as a kind of litmus test  — all aversive/balanced trainers said “a” and “b” and all Positive Reinforcement trainers say “c” and “d.” But nothing was that clear cut. That said, there were some ideas and themes that differentiated aversive/balanced and Positive Reinforcement. For instance, trainers who used aversive/balanced methods often described their training as relating to nature, saying they trained with “mother nature” or that they used “instinct.” On the other hand, trainers who used non-aversive methods described their training as based on “science,” harkening to the scientific literature that supports non-aversive training methods.

How Do You Describe A Shock Collar?

One clear differentiation between aversive/balanced and non-aversive trainers was in relation to electronic/shock collars. These terms were not used all that often but when they were used, one-hundred percent of the surveyed aversive/balanced trainers framed these tools as “electronic collars,” an arguably much less emotive term than “shock collar,” which was the term used by one-hundred percent of the Positive Reinforcement who mentioned this kind of aversive tool.

A minority of dog trainers' sites made it clear that the business was run by someone who was certified or had received a professional-level education.

Now where does that leave the normal dog owner who is just trying to find the right trainer for their dog? Even if you have strong ideas about the kind of trainer you're looking for, you have your work cut out for you. Unfortunately, as my research illustrates, there are few buzzwords that will inform owners on methodology. There are also no rules or legislation overseeing dog training, and few meaningful certifications governing how they practice, let alone what they serve up on their websites.

What To Look For (If You Know What You're Looking For)

For the publication, I worked up a brief table of some of the words that could be considered indicators for either type of training. However, one of the big takeaways from the study was the importance of the words within the context they appeared. Just the frequency of a word in a philosophy did not indicate a certain method. For example, the term “Positive Reinforcement” appeared in both aversive/balanced and non-aversive trainer documents but I needed to see it in context in order to ascertain what kind of methods its user advocated. For non-aversive trainers, “Positive Reinforcement” was used to describe their overarching methodology, whereas, for aversive/balanced trainers, the term was used to describe one part of their training methodology — a tool in their toolbox, if you will.

So, if words need to be read in their context and those words don’t even happen that frequently, what can you, as a dog owner do? If you know you're looking for a trainer who has a certain kind of overarching philosophy, I recommend using the word table below as an initial guide to perhaps identify some trainers and then to reach out to those trainers and observe a training session. That way, you can see that trainer in action and see how they interact and frame their training.