Why I’m Force Free
By: Gabriel Bufardeci
Tags: Anecdotes, Lifestyle, Pets, Dogs, Pets And Animals

I’d like to start this article by saying I’m not currently a dog trainer, not yet anyway. I have a lot to learn and a lot more to do before I would be comfortable taking on clients and sharing the knowledge that I have, at least to the extent that I eventually intend to. I am plagued by a fear that I will teach incorrect information and cause problems for people and their dogs; there are way too many trainers like that already and I refuse to be one of them. There’s a reason I’m like this, and I’ve met people that feel the same: I’m filled with guilt.

I always wanted a dog, we had dogs in the family, but never in my household, and I was borderline obsessed for most of my childhood. We used to make speeches every year in elementary school, you chose a topic, wrote a speech, and presented it. My speeches were never NOT about dogs, and I regularly researched the topic in attempts to get a dog into our house. The unconditional love you get from a dog is something I wanted, and I wanted to give that back to them as well. It took years, but it eventually happened.

I got Zoey, my now six-year-old Maltipoo, during the summer between first and second year at Queen’s University. I told my mom that being alone in residence was hard and that I needed company, school was never super hard for me, except when it came to my mental health. I told her I would be getting a chinchilla and that there’s nothing she could do about it because most of the time I’d be away from home anyways. She cracked, “Fine, we’ll get a dog”. I LOST it. I took “what breed is best for you?” quizzes on multiple websites, got my favourite breeds in a list, researched them to narrow it to 3 breeds, I’ll be getting a Havanese. Wait, there were not many Havanese breeders in Ontario at that time who had litters that I could get on-demand (on-demand, my first mistake.) Eventually, I settled for a Maltipoo that I found on Kijiji (mistake number two) and we went to meet her that weekend. Zoey, as I would name her, had been living in a cage in this man’s carpentry shed in Port Hope, she couldn’t be in the house as there was a pregnant Bulldog in the house at the time. She had already been taken from the litter and she was only six weeks old. The second he handed Zoey over to me, I decided it; this dog is mine.

Now, we have the dog, we have the crate, I’ve done a bunch of research resulting from Google searches such as “what a new dog owner should know”, “how to take care of puppies” and all that good stuff. If you’re noticing a trend of awful mistakes I made, then we’re on the same page. I should have already known the things that I was searching, and I should have been way more prepared to bring a living being into my life. But I loved dogs, and I LOVED Zoey, that’s all that matters, right?

Wrong.

I thought I was doing a great job finding information; after all, I had read countless hours of training advice from a certain salad named trainer. (I’m going to stop counting my mistakes now…) I Googled how to do a lot of dog stuff, it’s how I learned most of the things I know now; Google would eventually get me through University, so what’s the problem? Well, the problem was that I was teaching my dog what “no” meant by pinching her neck “like a mother dog would”, you know because do I not look like a bitch to you? And I spent a lot of time telling her what NOT to do. One of the main things that I learned which stuck, was that a dog with his head down, low tail, approaching you slowly, was the dog respecting your space and using their manners. My thought process was, “for the people who think I’m being mean, I’m doing what I need to do to make my dog happy, and this is how you make a dog happy”. What a lesson I was going to learn…

I’m going to flash forward. I spent the start of Zoey’s life utilizing “dominance theory” techniques, and got compliments everywhere I went on how well my dog listened and behaved, I was getting positive reinforcement for what I was doing. She was fearful. Up until about two years old, I stuck to this, but as I researched her new issues that would come up, I started finding positive reinforcement information. But there was an issue, all the trainers I had been following referred to R+ trainers (trainers that usually only utilize negative punishment, taking something good away, and positive reinforcement, adding something good) as “cookie trainers” and R+ trainers referred to balanced trainers as monsters and horrible people. I didn’t know who to believe, so I settled on a logical middle ground of “no tool is inherently bad, you just need to use it correctly”. To me, it was the safe option. This is actually why I try not to put down trainers that aren’t force free, being put down as a “balanced” trainer was something that worked to close my mind to their way of doing things.

Now, if you fast forward to a bit more to me starting my dog career, (I might write about the specifics of that in the future) then you get to the life-changing stuff. I walked dogs in my area while I worked construction, and eventually started volunteering at a dog training facility (tears now…). When I got there, I noticed three key things: my questions about corrections were always met with a soft “those aren’t needed” rather than being attacked for questioning, I had not seen any dogs ever get corrected EVER during class or otherwise, and finally, but most importantly, these dogs were the happiest fucking dogs I had ever seen.

“One of the main things that I learned which stuck, was that a dog with his head down, low tail, approaching you slowly, was the dog respecting your space and using their manners”. YEAH FUCKING RIGHT! What had I done to my dog, my poor baby? The one I love most in the whole world had been hurt by me, and I never inclined that this might be the case.

Please, excuse my language, but this is a hot topic for me. I did hours of research, and I promise, I was working hard. The fact that Google and YouTube searches on “how to help dogs”, results in information that has little to no science behind it is unacceptable! (read in Earl of Lemongrab’s voice). Trainers who have no foundation in science are so prevalent that for most of my time training Zoey, I believed that science was super limited on the subject and that we only knew that dogs acted certain ways based on how wolves act in the wild. So to go from that to learning that wolves that we see in the wild aren’t even the goddamn wolves that dogs came from, let alone that we found more effective, safe, and humane ways to do just about everything regarding dog behaviour, is honestly one of the most frustrating experiences I’ve gone through. It was so frustrating, that now my whole life revolves around how I can help solve this problem. Everything I do, from taking better care of my body, to working 12 hour days, and even writing this very article, I do it because I have to, I gotta do it for the doggos!

I hope that just hearing my story helps those who feel the same way as me, but I also hope that some lessons can be learned from this as well. Firstly, if you’re a force free trainer, then please, for the doggos, don’t use force on balanced trainers, your friends, or family, at least try not to. If you ever feel like insulting or belittling someone, just remember why YOU are a force free trainer: those methods either don’t work, or they work for the wrong reasons. And second, don’t beat yourself up if you took the time to learn this. It’s better to move in the wrong direction for years before finding out it’s wrong than to spend your whole life staying still. Doing things will result in failure, and the only way to never fail is to never do anything, that’s not sustainable. Don’t be burdened by your failures, and don’t be scared of it; walk into the unknowing and just trust yourself that, eventually, you’ll figure it out.

I want to end this by thanking Zoey, and all the other dogs that have helped me learn on my journey. If I could go back and be nicer, and use what I know now, I would, but I can’t. The only way I can help is by dedicating my life to reducing the suffering of pets in any way that I am empowered to. I will forever be an advocate for pets, other people’s and my own, to the best of my ability.