Are Youtube & Social Media actually HURTING dog training?

A lot of dog owners and trainers are not going to like this post…

But I’m going to say it anyway:  The advent of the “Internet Trainers” may actually be hurting - not helping - dog training as a whole.

Sure, it may feel great to ‘follow’ celebrity trainers, watch them work with difficult cases and present amazing turn-arounds in a dog’s behavior in just a few snippets of video.  

This gives hope to the many dog owners out there struggling with their dogs at home and might even get them to seek training with a professional.  Notice I said, “It might.”

Sure, you may pick up a technique or two that helps – for a while – with leash pulling, or problems recalling your dog, or teaching a ‘go to place’ exercise.

Sure, as trainers, we like to show our successes (and sometimes our struggles) to a wide audience - in today’s world, having a ‘social media presence’ means getting more clicks, which means getting more clients, which means paying the bills.

But there are some pretty serious problems with getting all (or most) of your dog training advice from snippets and video clips online.

Problem #1:  You’re Missing the Whole Picture.

What you may not realize when watching those amazing behavior turn-arounds, is the amount of work that is going on BEHIND the scenes. 

Dog behavior doesn’t change overnight, and the trainers working with those dogs are putting in HOURS - not minutes - of time working through their issues every day.  They’re practicing their craft with years of experience in reading dog body language, having great timing with rewards and corrections, and exceptional skills at coaching dogs through challenges.

(Or… depending on who you’re following… they just recently hung up a sign, called themselves a dog trainer, and started filming.  How much research have you done into their professional past before trying out their techniques on your dog???)

The ‘snippet approach’ carries the danger of lulling dog owners into thinking they can bring about miraculous change with minimal effort, which is rarely, if ever, the case.

Problem #2:  You’re missing out on the System or the Formula.

Every truly professional, established, experienced dog trainer I know has a very specific System of Training they’ve developed over time.  They follow their own ‘recipe’ or formula that they’ve cultivated with hundreds, or even thousands of dogs over a long career of working with dogs professionally.

They’ve put in hours, sweat, blood, and tears into honing a system that has proven to be successful with a high number of dogs.

Does this mean they plug any and every dog into their ‘formula’?  Of course not.  Every dog is unique; but a well-seasoned trainer reads the dog, and makes small adjustments to the formula so that the overall system has a high rate of success for each dog.

When you see a snippet of dog training on the internet, you’re really only seeing a glimpse – you don’t know what training came before or after the clip you’re watching.  

The next time you watch a clip and think, “Hey, that’s cool!  I’m going to try that.”  I challenge you to ask yourself these questions: 

1.  What exercises and how many repetitions were done before the video was filmed?  
2.  What skills were those exercises shaping in the dog before this clip? 
3.  What behavior traits will those skills turn into, if the skills are applied to real life?

If there are not definitive answers or explanations to these question in your clip – you’re only getting a glimpse – not a system.   And we’re back to the problem of not seeing the whole picture...

Which is why, when you try those techniques on your dog, without having the whole system, they often fall flat.

Problem #3:  You’re “Cherry Picking”.

“Cherry Picking” is defined by the Miriam Webster Dictionary as:  “to select the best or most desirable.”

Sound good, right?  Who wouldn’t want the best or most desirable dog training techniques for their dog?

But – hopefully you can see the catch here – how would you KNOW what are the best, or most desirable techniques offered by the thousands of trainers and millions of snippets out there on the mighty interwebs?

Once again, you’re trapped into dabbling with a little bit of this… a little bit of that… a dash of this technique, a pinch of that technique – all from different trainers, with different levels of experience and different systems.

What this most often leads to is a very confused and frustrated owner, and a very confused and frustrated dog.

Problem #4:  You’re mixing and matching recipes.

If each professional dog trainer has a ‘recipe’ for successful dog training, and you tried to combine all of them, that’s like taking a recipe for chocolate cake and mixing it with a recipe for macaroni and cheese – and just blindly hoping for the best… yuck!

Related to every other problem listed above, mixing systems of dog training very often fails.

This negatively affects the professional dog trainers out there and the owners that seek their help.

A ‘new’ trend I’m seeing more and more when I work with some clients is that they are still dabbling in multiple techniques they’ve seen on the internet, and trying to apply them (very often where and when their dog is not ready) to the system of training I’m teaching them.

Now we’re stuck in the macaroni & cheese + chocolate cake recipe combination… and again - Yuck.  

Let’s be real.  There’s no ‘one right way’ to train a dog (if there were, or if it were easy, all the trainers out there wouldn’t have jobs, and I wouldn’t have been training dogs for more than 35 years).

But – there IS a difference between a chocolate cake recipe and a macaroni and cheese recipe.

One trainer might make amazing chocolate cake.  Another makes amazing mac n’ cheese.  But no matter how much you love the cake, or the mac n’ cheese, you wouldn’t combine those recipes.

And this leads back to Problem #2: most trainers have a tried-and-true method and order of training that works, and works well for them.  Tossing in something you ‘saw on the internet’ can often interrupt or interfere what your trainer is trying to help you accomplish.

So, the next time you’re watching a 10 second clip on dog training, no matter who the trainer is, or what you think of them or their techniques, remember that you are seeing only a tiny snippet of the whole picture.

It doesn’t mean it’s a bad technique, Nor does it mean it’s the magic wand or pill you’ve been searching for, because like it or not, it’s always only going to be a glimpse - and very often you need the whole picture to make it work.

If you’re working with a trainer, don’t mix and match methods… trust them to get you where you’re going – I bet you’ll get there much faster than if you’re ‘tweaking’ a method they’ve used successfully on hundreds, thousands, or maybe even tens of thousands of dogs.

That’s it from this end of the leash.

Jennifer Hime is the owner and training director of Front Range K9 Academy in Wheat Ridge, CO and Front Range K9 NOCO in Loveland, CO.  She has been training dogs professionally since 1990.  She can be reached at https://frontrangek9noco.com