I used to train the harder way. Corrections, compulsion, the belief that a dog needed to obey, full stop. That's how I came up in this field, and for a long time I didn't question it.
The shift started around 2000, when a mentor showed me reinforcement-based training side by side with what I was already doing. The difference was staggering. Dogs trained with reinforcement responded faster, and without the flinch or the shutdown I'd normalized as "just how dogs are." In the actual performance of their jobs, we saw fewer errors, less avoidance. Not nicer. Better.
It still took me over a decade to fully cross over — I noticed it in 2000, didn't completely switch until 2011. And honestly, even now, I catch the old instinct. I could make this faster. Then I remember: faster isn't better, it just means the behavior gets shut down instead of resolved, and it's going to come out somewhere else, in some other form, later. Reinforcement-based work can take longer to get to what's actually driving a behavior. But once you find that, you can help the dog work through it — instead of just suppressing it and dealing with the fallout down the line.
Underneath the technique question is a harder one. Dogs aren't robots. Science makes that increasingly difficult to ignore — dogs experience emotion, and their brains process it in ways that look a lot like ours. A study out of the University of Vienna this August used brain imaging on awake dogs and found their brains don't just register "good mood, bad mood" from our faces — they show distinct activity patterns for fear, anger, and sadness, meaning dogs are reading specific human emotions, not a vague category of "upset." If dogs are sentient beings who feel pain, fear, and frustration the way the research keeps confirming, the question becomes: why would I, a sentient being, choose to cause pain or fear to another sentient being in the name of "training"?
The research backs this up past the ethics, too. A 2017 review in the Journal of Veterinary Behavior found aversive methods are consistently linked to more stress, fear, and aggression in dogs, without solid evidence they're actually more effective at getting the behavior you want. A 2020 study in PLOS ONE found dogs trained with aversive methods showed more stress signals during training sessions and tested more "pessimistic" on cognitive bias tasks afterward — meaning the effect didn't stay contained to the training session, it changed how they experienced the rest of their lives. And a study out of the University of Lincoln comparing e-collar training to reward-focused methods for recall around livestock found positive reinforcement got there just as fast, without the fallout.
Here's a piece I don't see talked about enough: reward-based training takes ongoing study — operant and classical conditioning, functional behavior analysis, animal behavior, ethology — there's so much more to learn than just the vocabulary that comes with it. I'm still studying. Schools, courses, webinars, conversations with mentors and respected trainers in the field, even back in university classrooms. Some days I still feel like I don't know enough — like a baby in a sinking boat, trying to help a dog and not sure I have what it takes in that moment. That's exactly why holistic trainers need each other. We reach out, we ask, we help each other work through it. Dog training was never a competition. It's about helping a family and a dog live in harmony, whether that dog has a job or just a home, within what's actually realistic for both the humans and the dog involved. A study published this February (Frontiers in Veterinary Science) interviewed working trainers and found something telling: the ones fully committed to reinforcement-based methods tended to ground their practice in the actual science and keep studying it. That's the work. Not a badge you earn once — something you keep doing.
I still feel the old instinct sometimes — the itch for the faster fix. But I land in the same place every time. Fast and suppressed was never the goal. Understood and worked through is.
Sources:
- Hernández-Pérez, R., Concha, L., Andics, A., Bernal-Gamboa, R., & Cuaya, L. V. (2026). Dog brain representations of human facial expressions: Encoding happiness and differentiating specific negative expressions. iScience. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2026.116900
- Ziv, G. (2017). The effects of using aversive training methods in dogs — A review. Journal of Veterinary Behavior, 19, 50–60. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jveb.2017.02.004
- Vieira de Castro, A. C., Fuchs, D., Morello, G. M., et al. (2020). Does training method matter? Evidence for the negative impact of aversive-based methods on companion dog welfare. PLOS ONE, 15(12), e0225023. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0225023
- China, L., Mills, D. S., & Cooper, J. J. (2020). Efficacy of Dog Training With and Without Remote Electronic Collars vs. a Focus on Positive Reinforcement. Frontiers in Veterinary Science, 7:508. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/veterinary-science/articles/10.3389/fvets.2020.00508/full
- DeLeeuw, J. L., & Williams, T. J. (2026). Professional dog trainers' perspectives on training methods: ethical and evidentiary insights. Frontiers in Veterinary Science, 13. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/veterinary-science/articles/10.3389/fvets.2026.1744448/full