I'm Usually Not the First Trainer You Called

What Bad Training Advice Really Costs Your Dog

Most of the clients who find me have already tried something else. A trainer they found online. Advice from a well known name. A tip from a friend or a Facebook group. Sometimes a quick search that turned up something that sounded reasonable and official.

I don't ask about it much. We just move forward. But over the years I have seen enough of what comes through my door to know that bad advice...even well meaning bad advice...doesn't just fail to fix the problem. It creates new ones. And those new problems are often harder to fix than whatever you started with.

I want to talk about that. Not to point fingers at anyone. But because you deserve to know what I see on the other end.

The puppy who learned the world wasn't safe

One of the cases that stays with me is a puppy who came to me fearful and reactive. He was nine weeks old when his previous trainer put a choke chain on him and yanked him around. Nine weeks. At an age when a puppy's entire job is to learn whether the world is safe or scary...he learned it was scary.

That kind of damage doesn't just go away. Fear that gets installed that early and that hard takes a long time to work through, and some of it never fully leaves.

The food bowl that became a battleground

This one I see more than almost anything else, and it almost always starts with advice that sounds completely logical.

Mess with your puppy's food bowl so they get used to it. If they growl, correct them.

The owners who followed that advice weren't doing anything wrong intentionally. They were trying to prevent problems before they started. They found the advice online, it came from a confident source, and they followed it consistently. That last part is what made it worse.

Here is what actually happens. The dog learns two things simultaneously. First, that humans near the food bowl are a genuine threat who will not leave them alone. Second, that growling doesn't work...so skip it and go straight to action.

I have worked with dogs that took four months of consistent careful work to reach a point where the family could simply walk past while he ate. Four months of work to undo something that never had to happen in the first place.

What works instead? Make the human approaching the bowl predict something better is coming. Extra yummy things get added when you walk past. The dog stops guarding and starts looking up at you hopefully. Same puppy, completely different outcome, based entirely on the approach.

The dog who stopped warning you first

A dog that growls is telling you something. It is communicating discomfort, asking for space, giving you information you need. When owners are told to correct the growl...the dog doesn't become more comfortable. It just stops telling you. The discomfort is still there. The threshold is still there. But now you don't get a warning before it's crossed.

I have seen dogs come to me that went straight to a bite with no signal beforehand. Not because they were born that way. Because someone taught them that the signal didn't work.

The owner who was told she wasn't doing the work

This one stays with me because of how unfair it was.

A small woman. A large reactive pit bull. A well known trainer who told her the solution was an hour of walking every day. She did it. Every single day for a year. And she kept being told she wasn't trying hard enough. What was actually happening was that her dog was spending an hour every day practicing and rehearsing the reactive behavior. He wasn't getting tired of reacting. He was getting better at it. By the time she found me the reactivity was deeply ingrained and she had lost all confidence in herself as an owner.

We stopped the walks. Her dog needed to stop being constantly triggered before we could build anything new. Eventually he was able to join our social classes with a muzzle. Eventually she could walk him again. But it took time that didn't have to be lost.

She was doing the work the whole time. She just needed someone to give her the right work to do.

A word about fairness

I also want to be honest about something. Training is a partnership. A good trainer gives you the right roadmap but you have to drive. There are cases where the advice was sound and the approach was right and it still didn't work because the follow through wasn't there. That happens. Trainers are not always the problem.

But the cases that stay with me longest are not the difficult ones I helped. They are the ones I never got the chance to. The dogs whose owners were told training didn't work...and who ran out of options before they found someone who could actually help. I have been doing this long enough to know that behind many of those stories is a dog that could have been fine. With the right guidance, the right approach, enough time. That is not a small thing to sit with.

What I want you to take from this

I am not writing this to make you distrust every trainer or every piece of advice you find. Good trainers exist. Good advice exists. But the dog training world is largely unregulated and the gap between someone who knows what they are doing and someone who sounds like they know what they are doing can be very hard to see from the outside.

What I want you to know is this. If something feels wrong...it might be. If your dog is getting worse instead of better...that matters. If you are being told you aren't trying hard enough but you know in your gut that you are...trust that gut and get a second opinion.

Fixing it after doing it wrong always takes longer than doing it right in the first place.