Positive Training or Balanced Training?

I believe you don’t have to prescribe to one style of training, you can do whatever works best for the human and dog in front of you. 

One of the downsides of social media is that it can intensify the “us vs them” dynamic in situations and  conversations that are actually highly nuanced. Dog training is no exception and I find the polarization between different training groups to be more harmful than good.

I define myself as a holistic balanced dog trainer, but I find a huge amount of value in learning from +R trainers. But I also disagree with some balanced training methods. Does that make me a +R trainer? Well no, because I use E-Collars & prong collars, and I do agree with some balanced trainers. But for some dogs I only use +R training methods… So what is it? Am I a balanced trainer or a +R trainer? 

It seems silly and exhausting to try to fit ourselves into boxes. It seems very confusing and stressful to be a dog owner who just wants help with their dog and doesn’t understand the nuance that actually intertwines these two schools of thought. 

I think the most important thing is to understand why different training philosophies work for different individuals in different situations. Neither one is 100% right or wrong, they both have elements that are applicable depending on context. More importantly, there is a huge amount of diversity in education, methods, tool usage within each training group making the line between balanced and +R highly dependent on who you talk to and what you are talking about. 

In the past, curating my curriculum in order to prescribe to one kind of training philosophy ended up being limiting, not empowering. The training that I do is what works best for the dog and human in front of me, it doesn’t need to be more complicated than that.