When I was in high school I did one quarter of an “Internship” class. We did some practice writing resumes, talking about being responsible, and then spending most of our time out doing some sort of internship. The local community was really great and let the students come and participate in all kinds of career opportunities. I wanted to be involved in animal training even then but there were very limited options locally. The dog trainer with the biggest presence in the community never returned calls from my teacher. The teacher was involved in conformation showing with her English cockers. Her calls were returned by a guy who taught one night of classes a week and he allowed me to come and watch.
The man was very nice in terms of making it a valuable learning experience. He offered to let me bring my own dog through the class at no cost. I politely declined. He let me watch and make notes and and he encouraged me to ask questions.
While I was happy to have the opportunity…. it wasn’t a great match. Even at that point, I was very enthusiastic about positive reinforcement type dog training and knew that this person had a very different way of training. It was really hard to watch how the dogs and puppies were handled as a “normal” part of training.
On the last night of classes, a Westie puppy was held down to the ground. He was squeaking and trying to get up. The correction was for some non serious, casual puppy biting. I was worried the dog owner was going to actually get bit as the puppy got more and more stressed. Finally the puppy ‘gave up’ and lay there panting on the ground. I ended up crying while watching the interaction. The instructor was very casual about it. The owner hesitated, but complied with the instruction as he trusted the professional in this situation.
Afterwards, the instructor was concerned about my response. In a serious but caring way told me “If you can’t do that, you won’t be able to be a dog trainer. It’s necessary.” And after a little more talking, one of the last things he said, not in reference to anything that I said, was “I wonder how they train dolphins. I’d like to see how that’s done.”
That was such a funny ending to my interactions with him. One of the primary authors about clicker training at that time was Karen Pryor who is also well known for learning about clicker training through her experiences working with porpoises. In all the years since then, not only have I not had to hold any dogs down as part of training… the kind of dog training I do has a lot of similarities to how dolphins are trained.
Now the question is – it looks like the guy is probably still in business. Do I write a nice and polite letter to thank him and about the experiences I’ve had since then?