From: rhh@alice.att.com (r hardin)
Newsgroups: rec.pets.dogs
Subject: Re: Help with Shepherds
Date: 10 Nov 92 14:26:31 GMT
Article-I.D.: alice.24135
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill NJ



Stephen R. Lee writes:
>>Good obedience courses look to developing the character of the dog,
>>and it is the character that you see forever after.

>I suppose I would extend this to say that good obedience courses develop
>the human counterpart, providing them with the means to understand and
>communicate with their dogs, as well as a variety of training tools to
>use.  Tools in the methodology sense.  Kohler is one method.  There are
>lots of others.  None are fool proof in all given situations.  Dogs are
>individuals and should be treated as such.  Obedience classes that develop
>the human side of the equation in this manner naturally cause the character
>of the dog, the human, and the relationship to be elevated.

(Just marking the article, lots deleted)

I want to talk about rec.pets.dogs, and what is taken to be expert advice,
and why it's so impoverished.

What you wrote hovers on being right, but does not prevent things going
wrong again.  It doesn't try to say what communication involves, or
what understanding is, and that these relate to character very much,
they are character.

So very quickly, understanding becomes what is easiest, a sappy teddy-bear
feeling;  and communication becomes the alpha roll, and we're right back
in the same old junk.

And there's no sight of character anywhere.

Look at it: yesterday I took my Dobie tracking again, put the sock out
in the alfalfa field, and told her to ``find it!'' and she races off
and brings it back from a half mile away.  It is glorious.

What is she thinking?  ``I am Susie who finds socks in alfalfa fields!''

Nobody marvels:  Look how much she loves you!

Nobody thinks:  How submissive she is to you!


Look, it doesn't have to do with using Koehler - Koehler happens to train
using character as the sole reference point, so he never loses sight of
what a dog is - but you have to teach character, not undermine it.

It involves your character when you teach character.  First of all,
this is a problem for a class, because obedience instructors tend to
be young;  they teach bribing, or ``communication,'' instead, because
they have little else to teach.  Fine, they'll outgrow it, as long as
there's a community of dog people who can actually point to something
else as better.  You don't hear this today.

Thinking that training methods supply tools is wrong - it serves as the
fatal displacement, the fatal deferment, of the whole point of being a dog.

---
How do you teach character?  Without bribing, without coaxing, without
threatening, without dominating, you insist on absolute obedience, and
that means absolute.

Infinite obligation is the appearance of the moral other, and that is
its relation to character.

The appearance of the moral other is the beginning of language, and that
is how communication comes in - not as a tool.

The dog becomes half of a moral pair, you and the dog, and you're both
under an infinite obligation;  you both respond to the other.  The dog
makes a leap and sees who he is.  ``I am Susie who sits in spite of rabbits!''
And that's what ``Susie'' means to you, then, too.  You have to earn the right
to command a dog.

That's why Koehler teaches as he does, both you and the dog.
---

It has nothing to do with whether the Koehler ear pinch is better than
one of Bowman's corrections, so I'm not talking about that.  I'm talking
about what's kept in sight, which is where, for example, I think Bowman
falls down.  Just to pick an otherwise good method to criticize, incidentally.

Displacements.  Infinite obligation, the beginning of the moral relation,
is what adolescents are seeing dimly in their sappy ideas of love; and
that shows up in the teddy-bear school.

The alpha roll school sees infinite obligation as dominating, but then
necessarily puts in ``pleasing me'' in the obligation, and it fails
to be moral.  There is no promise made to the dog, no infinite obligation
placed on me the trainer, that this is important, I promise.  It's
that promise that the dog will investigate and test.