From: rhh@alice.att.com (r hardin)
Newsgroups: rec.pets.dogs
Subject: Re: behavior modification or dog training
Date: 19 Nov 92 14:36:45 GMT
Article-I.D.: alice.24240
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill NJ



Stephen R Lee writes:
>>If you teach what Koehler does, the way he does, it always works.

>No.  There is no teaching methodology or philosophy that will work on
>all dogs in all situations all of the time.  I don't care how many 
>anecdotal pieces of evidence you care to give me about Kohler, or
>anyone else cares to give me about their favorite method.  There is
>NO method that will work on ALL dogs ALL of the time.  Period.

Well, I won't try to read your stake in that, but consider that
there is perhaps simply no problem training dogs, it is EASY.

You can use a great variety of methods, as you say, so I am agreeing
with you that far.

They do not all teach character, they do not all have any vision of
the dog as a great dog.

Koehler will work at the level you imagine training works, for the same
reason that other methods work at that level - teaching the dog what
you want takes (what?) about 3 minutes, and persuading him to do it
in one form or another maybe a couple days, if you want, in lots of
different ways.  Koehler generally takes a week.

What Koehler retains in the program that so many have picked and chosen
from, and why Koehler works with every dog even indominable ones, is giving
the dog a stake in what he does.  The dog thinks he's a great dog, and
is one, because he's opened a new space to occupy.

Training in what I've been calling the teddy-bear school and the dominance
school, to characterize the two most popular ones in the dog books today,
are such sad affairs, without any vision at all to offer the dog or you.
As if training were a regrettable necessity, if I can put it that way.

I am trying to make Koehler readable again.  Take the book, and for a moment
put aside the duck of doubt about whether this is exactly just the right
technical move you'd make that that particular time - because it doesn't matter
much, the dog will get trained - and read the consistency of the vision
he has of the dog as intelligent and responsible, and the constant pains
he goes to to get you to show that vision to the dog.

If you can keep that vision, which is forgotten today absolutely,
then it doesn't matter if you use the Koehler ear pinch or the
Bauman collar snatch, you'll be using Koehler.
---

Here's an anecdote nonetheless.

I was training Susie in tracking one day in a park, and it so happened
that the local obedience instructor had picked out that field to train
her dog in tracking too - two cars in the desert colliding, as it were -
so she put her dog on a stay and came over to ask me where i'd walked,
so she'd be able to understand any difficulties her dog had that might
be due to it.

After a minute, her dog broke the stay and came over too.  Here's the
amazing part, she didn't correct the dog!

We've talked training a lot, and she thinks Koehler doesn't work either.

I'm sure you have a very well trained dog, but my experience with trainers
in clubs who teach training is that they don't like Koehler, and their
own dogs aren't very well trained.  It is as if dog training were a very
_precarious_ thing to them, very _chancy_.

None of them mentioned the robot theory of Koehler, or said Koehler
didn't work with my dog, because Susie was eminently there.

I think it is true that some dogs are in a way harder to train, in particular
submissive ones, in that you have to be very _accurate_ to avoid dominating
them.  You don't want or accept a submissive oppressed dog-wimp posture,
you want a working posture;  so for example you have to be very careful
to avoid leaning over them when you show them no, like this! and praise
the result.  There is sloppy handling even with Koehler.  (This is
Vicki Hearne's observation from training a wolf hybrid.)

Several people have written to me that Koehler doesn't work very well
with certain breeds and so forth.  Well, Koehler taught classes for
years, and personally supervised the training of over 10,000 dogs
in that time, and I think he'd have noticed that if it were true.
He publishes an affidavit to the contrary, in fact.  So maybe I am hopelessly
naive, but I don't think so.

Moreover, two trainers I know of using Koehler make no mention of such a
result, and they have no particular reason to suppress the supposed fact.
They are professional trainers.

Finally my own experience with three dogs, two of them highway strays and one
my Dobie Susie, is that training is the easiest thing in the world, and
probably the most enjoyable too.  So enjoyable that we kept on going
through the utility and training books, and I am trying my best to share this.
It's not many dogs, but it's lots of years.

I have noticed that people who train dogs here tend to say things
like ``A dog should never be taken off leash near traffic, because
no matter how well trained he is, he might dash off for some reason.''
I find this amazing, what in the world are these people teaching?

It's time to look at whether something is missing.
Newsgroups: rec.pets.dogs