Hey everyone, welcome to the Houndations podcast. I'm your host, Tony Peterson. And today's

episode is all about keeping your dog honest and keeping yourself honest during training sessions.

This episode, I don't know, it might be a tough pill to swallow for some folks, but that's okay.

Dog training, or I guess I probably should say like developing a dog so it's not a total embarrassment at home or in the field.

It's just a long game task that can include some shortcuts.

It can include some methods that will sort of mask greater issues, but generally both those and shortcuts will

come back to haunt you at some point in the dog's life. There's just a process to this stuff,

which is ripe with pitfalls, but we should be self-aware enough to not only keep our dogs honest,

but keep ourselves honest. So buckle up, because that's what I'm going to talk about right now.

I've had the good fortune to interview dozens and dozens of professional dog trainers in my career,

and I'm truly good friends with some of them.

It's always interesting how different trainers approach the same problems with dogs.

Some trainers, you know, often older trainers or young ones with something to prove or a program to sell, they kind of often have like very straightforward answers to questions. If you ask them

how to get a dog to heal, they'll launch into a point A to

B monologue on the exact steps to take. There are usually a few false starts and caveats,

but mostly the road is a straight one, with clear sight lines for miles. This is often great

general advice, but general doesn't always apply to individual dogs.

Other trainers are more philosophical, and they're much harder to interview. They don't like

pigeonholing dogs or putting up too many guardrails to their advice, because they know that no

matter what, dogs are individuals dog owners too

and the influence they have on dogs is huge and in the realm of training often not great the more

philosophical trainers either haven't learned to tune out the constant contradictory thoughts in sort of a

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