The Dogenius Institute - Make animals' lives
better in your own unique way.

Jun 9 / Teresa Tyler

Would You Let Someone Train Your Dog If You Knew How Little Training They Had?

I often find myself wondering what future generations will make of the dog training industry. Not the dogs themselves, and not even the endless debates about methods, tools or terminology. Those arguments will probably still be happening long after I'm gone.

What fascinates me is how we, as a society, have somehow come to accept a profession where almost anyone can wake up one morning and decide they are qualified to advise people about behaviour.
If that sounds harsh, bear with me. Imagine for a moment that you've never heard of dog training. You're an outsider looking in and trying to make sense of how it all works. You discover that dogs can suffer from anxiety, fear, frustration and chronic stress. You learn that behavioural problems are one of the leading reasons dogs lose their homes and that serious behaviour issues can have devastating consequences for both dogs and the people around them.
Naturally, you assume there must be some fairly robust system in place to ensure the people advising owners know what they're doing.Then you discover there isn't. Or at least, not in the way most people would imagine.

If your boiler breaks, you probably wouldn't hand the job to someone simply because they have owned a toolbox for twenty years.
If you needed a physiotherapist, you wouldn't choose one based solely on how many followers they have on social media.
Yet in the dog world, we routinely make decisions in exactly that way.
Every day, I see people posting online asking for recommendations for a trainer or behaviourist. Within minutes the comments start rolling in."Use Dave. He was brilliant with my Labrador.""Try Sarah. She trained my Cockapoo.""My neighbour used John and he's amazing."

At first glance that sounds perfectly reasonable. The problem is that none of those recommendations actually tell us very much. They tell us that somebody had a good experience, which is valuable, but they don't tell us whether the advice was evidence-based, whether the trainer understood learning theory, whether they recognised signs of pain or medical disease, or whether they were working within their scope of competence.

The thing is, we don't behave like this in most other areas of life. When we're looking for a school, a doctor, an accountant or even a solicitor, we tend to ask questions about qualifications, training, experience and accountability. We expect some form of oversight. We want to know that somebody, somewhere, has checked that this person is competent, yet when it comes to our dogs, those questions often disappear.

When Did Popularity Become a Substitute for Expertise?

Perhaps that's because dogs feel familiar to us? Almost everyone knows someone who has owned dogs for years. Most of us grew up around them and we all have opinions, experiences and stories. The result is that expertise can sometimes become blurred with familiarity.

Living with dogs for thirty years undoubtedly teaches you things. So does training hundreds of dogs. So does working with clients every day. Experience matters enormously.

The difficulty is that experience and expertise are not the same thing.

Someone can repeat the same mistakes for thirty years and call it experience. Equally, someone can spend thirty years learning, questioning, reflecting and improving. From the outside, those two people can look remarkably similar.

One of the things I have noticed over the years is that the genuinely knowledgeable people in our profession are rarely the ones claiming to have all the answers. In fact, they are often the people most willing to admit uncertainty. They recognise that behaviour is complex, that dogs are individuals and that there is still much we don't fully understand.

The irony is that certainty is often far more attractive.

Simple explanations spread quickly. They fit neatly into a Facebook comment or a TikTok video. They offer reassurance in a world that can feel confusing.

Behaviour isn't simple. Welfare isn't simple. Learning isn't simple. The relationship between genetics, health, environment and experience certainly isn't simple. Yet we continue to gravitate towards people who promise straightforward answers to complicated problems.

Perhaps that's why this issue matters so much.

The future of dog training will not be determined by trainers. It won't be determined by colleges, professional organisations, awarding bodies or governments. It will be determined by dog guardians and the questions they choose to ask.

The moment people stop asking, "Who's the best trainer?" and start asking, "How did they learn what they know?" the conversation alters.

The moment people become interested in professional standards rather than popularity, the industry changes and the moment people recognise that confidence is not the same thing as competence, everything looks different.

Maybe future generations will look back at this period and find it extraordinary that we ever accepted anything else. They may wonder why people entrusted the welfare of their dogs to individuals whose education, knowledge and competence were often impossible to verify.

If they do, I suspect they'll be asking the same question that keeps occurring to me.

How did we convince ourselves that being good with dogs was enough?