Mother dog punishment justification

I recently had a debate among some other trainers that are members of our national association here in Canada. I was unaware that so many of them were punishment based trainers and sadly have had to reconsider my membership in the group. I do not want my membership dollars going towards the promotion of using ecollars, prong collars or other such punishment based devices.

One interesting point of argument that many trainers use who employ punishment in their training is that mother dogs use correction and thus punishment and correction are natural and should be part of any training program. Often other dogs are referenced as well, not just the mother, since adult dogs correct other dogs as well.

Let's look at this a little closer:

1) Dog-Dog correction is always expertly timed exactly when the behavior is happening, and it is usually very mild. Mother dogs do not bite their puppies, they often only growl, stare or snap. A physical touch would only happen if these other methods failed, and again it would be very fast and only last fractions of a second. Most other dogs operate in the same manner, a quick growl or snap to get the message across

2) Dog correction is often related to their own well being. Mother dogs will correct a puppy if he bites her too hard while milking, or if fighting with litter-mates. Other dogs usually will correct for things like being humped, continued harassment (to play or otherwise), to guard a resource or to create space and say 'get away from me'.

The key point here is the correction is not designed to compel the other dog into forced action. You do not see other dogs forcing other dogs into heel position, down-stays or loose leash walks. They are not concerned with the other dogs behavior outside of how it relates to them.

This is a key central theme that all people would do well to take note of: Dogs seek to control their own lives, while humans seek to control the dogs.

Another key point of 'correction' is a dog wouldn't correct for natural behaviors. A dog would never 'naturally' be expecting to be corrected for 'normal' behaviors like digging, jumping or chewing objects.

Humans live in a complex world, which dogs do not naturally understand. We need to use our big brains to show them how to live in a modern world, how to not chew our nike shoes and how to cope with being alone for 8 hours. There is nothing natural about the things we ask of the modern dog, so the idea that we can train dogs the same way they train either other is just foolish.

People have been researching dog training for the last 100 years, imagine the strides that have been made in the last 30 years alone. The internet didn't exist 15 years ago, imagine how different the world is in just that brief time. The idea that we haven't found a better way to train our dogs other than watching their mother is pretty insulting to human intelligence.