Too Many Cooks in the Caldron!
There’s an old saying that too many cooks spoil the broth, or on this HALLOWEEN day, we say that they spoil the caldron of witches brew!
I’ve been thinking a lot about that idiom lately because as a behaviorist, I come across a lot of “cooks” in this unregulated dog training industry that allows anyone to dispense dog advice. Unfortunately, this makes our jobs as trainers or behaviorists increasingly difficult because it seems that lately everyone is wearing a cook’s COSTUME.
Often times these faceless persons on the internet are “cooks”, as are some TV trainers, and many clients are now “cooks”, having taken advice from Google and other sources. Emboldened with their new found knowledge, they come to a training session thinking they understand the intricacies of training and behavior analysis. This can be a deterrent to learning something new.
As one perspective client put it “I don’t want to waste my time with the foundation behaviors, because I’m ready for something more advanced.”
Another client, who had already hired and fired, several “cooks” to train his dog, was pretty sure that if we added some treats to the plan we could quickly train out his dog’s new SPOOKY behavior, (the results from the prong and shock collar protocol, that was meted out by the former “cook”).
The point is that while I understand that other trainers have their own ideas of how to train dogs, just like real cooks have their own recipes for dishes, there is nothing in my training recipes that call for “ingredients” like EYE OF NEWT, TOE of FROG & WOOL OF BAT (aka shocks, pops or sock); moreover, even if the former trainer was a positive reinforcement trainer, they have their own recipes that they teach, which means when a person is hiring a different trainer there is no leeway to skip ahead, because the student has learned from someone else’s recipe which often clashes with a new program.
I’ll digress…A few months ago I was looking for a lasagna recipe, and I found several, and each cook’s ingredients were somewhat different, such as regular lasagna noodles vs no-boil noodles and all veggies vs meat, not to mention the other cooks who tried the recipes but decided to post their own twists on the original recipe, some of which didn’t even resemble lasagna anymore!
In dog training, there’s a huge difference between teaching the dog to come when called which results in delicious food reinforcer vs coming when called which results in patting the dog’s head or making the dog sit before getting reinforced. And while I don’t expect a perspective client to understand right off why these things are likely to produce different results, however, with time and commitment to learning the basics, the outcome should prove more favorable than mixing a little bit of this or that from a MAGIC SPELL posted on social media.
When you come to a training session with your own ideas, there’s no HOCUS POCUS we professionals can add to or remove from, the cauldron of someone’s witches brew to turn it into a delicious “behavior stew”, so to speak.
If you’ve found a competent professional who is devoted to helping, and not hurting your dog, I hope you come to the table not as a “cook”, but instead wearing your student COSTUME, ready and excited to learn a new training POTION!
HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
© Fran Berry CPDT-KA, UW-AAB all rights reserved 2022
