Dogs are trained using a variety of methods, some more effective than others. Aversive dog training methods (e.g. methods using primarily negative reinforcement and positive punishment) can actually do more harm than good. When training your dog, it is important to be aware of the consequences of using aversive training methods because the fallout from methods falling into their category can be difficult to reverse and take you further away from achieving your dog training goals. While aversive training methods might achieve the desired result in the short term, they can have long-term negative consequences for your dog's behavior. Read on to find out more about a few ways your dog can present fallout from these training methods and why they should be avoided.

One of the most common questions I get as a professional dog trainer from students with puppies is about aggression and biting. We unfortunately have even had people email us inquiring about signing up for classes to have them reply back that they rehomed the puppy before class even started because the puppy was "aggressive".

True aggression in puppies is extremely rare. I have only seen one to two cases of true aggression in a puppy under four months of age in all my years of working with dogs.

So, what are puppy owners actually seeing then?

Did you know that you could making your dog's behavior worse by saying "No"? Daily we get emails from people who say that they say "No" a thousand times a day to their dog and they just don't understand why it isn't working and why the dog's behavior is getting worse.

There are two questions I want you to ask yourself:

1. How did you train your dog to respond to the word "No"?

2. How much time do you spend on Facebook?

When I started dog training many moons ago, the field was based mainly on the now-debunked dominance theory. The current principles applied to dog training were just mere whispers of what was to come. However, I think this goes to show how far dog training is behind other forms of behavior modification and learning. I don’t know about you, but I have never seen any zookeepers or marine mammal trainers apply corrections to their animal students and expect anything other than certain death. Why do we seem to think that dogs are different than any other mammal on the planet?

My first thought about this is we have no data to even prove that statement. Someone’s opinion on what they think they have seen a handful of times isn’t enough to make it factual information.

I have had many clients not helped by both other force-free trainers and more punitive trainers. My guess as to why? The trainers both aren’t experience enough in their methods to successfully handle that case. End of story. Nothing more and nothing less.

Well, here we go into one of the most debated topics in the dog world. We had to go down the rabbit hole at some point. A few days ago I came across a post on my Facebook feed by an aspiring trainer, and I was disappointed to see how a blooming once-promising positive trainer was talking about how “corrections” were needed to train dogs. Their point was that “positive only” training is much too permissive, and we are leaving out a huge chunk of information a dog needs to learn – what they are doing wrong.

Last night, I had a pretty cool experience. In my brochures I was handing out about Faithfully Yours, a man read the section that said I was studying Psychology.

He asked me where I was studying and what plans I had after that. I told him I would be continuing on for my Animal Behavior degree in a year or so. He said, “WOW! They have an animal psychology degree now!?”He then told me this amazing story about his older dog he had trained to sit at intersections on their walks and wait for him to point in the direction they were going, before the dog would continue walking.

He then added, “I used my psychology degree to teach him all that stuff, come to think of it.”

My name is Lauren Parks and I have been training dogs using positive methods for 11 years. I started training dogs in Nashville, TN. Eleven years ago, trainers in Nashville were using positive methods to train dogs. Clicker training was highly recommended and you rarely saw a prong collar on a dog. Fast forward to today, I am training dogs in Mississippi.

Mississippi is known for many things. Most of those things are negative, like having obese citizens, having lax animal cruelty laws, and being the most corrupt state in the nation. We are known as being backwards and behind on the times.

Clicker training, for those who are unfamiliar (and boy, are you missing out), is a positive reinforcement method that can be used to train any mammal, domesticated or wild. I have even seen fish learn from a modified version of clicker training.

While clicker training, you use a clicker, which makes a “click” noise, to mark the behavior we want to reinforce. The clicker doesn’t mean anything to the dog at first, but by following Pavlov’s lead, we can condition the dog to be reinforced by the clicking sound.