In “Call Of The Wild” there is scene where the dog “Buck” is beaten with a club repeatedly to keep him line and train him not to attack his new masters. I know things were a lot more brutal in the past, but did people with working dogs regularly beat their dogs into being obedient or did a smart trainer not use force to discipline their dogs. It’s tempting to assume they did but would that result in a useful working dog of just a fearful, paralyzed dog?
How were things handled dog training-wise before modernity?
Clubs I can’t say but some were hit and/or whipped to the point of having scars. I never understood the concept and my family never practiced it as far as I know but the excuse was showing the pack you were clearly the “Alpha dog” as a way of getting them to follow or obey you.
I don’t have expert knowledge on the question, but I’ve seen numerous books, paintings, pictures, and so forth implying that beating dogs was the norm in the 19th century and before, and it seems reasonable. After all, beating children was the norm. Beating adults, if they were slaves or servants or inmates or members of the military, was the norm. Why would dogs have been treated any better?
Of course some dogs, such as lap togs/toys in a rich household, probably got treated better than others.
Firstly…who is this they? Secondly, if ‘they’ all beat their dogs would the dogs have allowed themselves to be domesticated? Thirdly your assumption that people were more brutal to their animals in the past needs some proof. Lets ask Michael Vick.
“They” are the people who raised and trained working animals.
I think you may be assigning a bit more agency to the dog’s decision making process in “allowing” themselves to become domesticated than is appropriate. Behavioral conditioning via violence is quite commonplace in nature and in history.
My 85 year old father was talking recently how when he was young, dogs were often poorly behaved and dangerous, as they were kept outside, beaten and ill trained (or not trained at all). It’s actually fairly rare these days to find a vicious dog in the park in comparison to the extent of friendly, well socialised dogs. We know better about good training methods these days.
Yeah, we are not entirely beyond the era of abusive training techniques.
Cesar Millan, the self-described “Dog Whisperer,” relies on subtle violence to intimidate and train his charges. There are videos online clearly showing his “kick the dog in the short ribs with one heel” technique – just Google Cesar Millan, Dog Kicker. To be fair, Millan is an advocate for pit bulls and originally came to public attention for his work with severely troubled dogs who were on the verge of being put down, which may or may not excuse desperate measures, depending on the observer.
One of the trainers we interviewed, who came highly recommended, insisted on having unfettered access to our dog for a month – out of our sight – and warned us he uses some controversial aversive techniques that might make us uncomfortable. We did not hire him.
I knew quiter a few old bird dog trainers who trained on the plantaions of the south. They were hard on dogs. They wanted results quick. Only a fool would beat his dog because he lost his temper. A hard jerk on the collar, or smack on the butt was considered normal training. I have had dogs ( mostly labs) that required a little roughness just to get thier attention. Minimum neccessary force I think would have been the goal of most proffessionals. What they considered minimum might be somewhat different than today.
Attitudes are certainly changing. There was a very good reason why they “broke” horses to the saddle, or house “broke” dogs. They were literally breaking the animal’s spirit. We humans seem to like to punish bad behavior as a first response but rewarding good behavior actually gets better results. We even do that with each other, as someone upstream pointed out.
The Horse Whisperer guy showed us the way with horses, proving that you didn’t have to brutalize a horse to get him to do what you asked.
Cesar Milan is very mis-named as the dog whisperer because his methods are anything BUT whispering. He follows alpha dominance theory, which has now been fully debunked. He’s not whispering to the dog, he’s yelling in it’s face, to follow the metaphor.
If you guys want a really amazing demonstration of what you can do with positive and gentle training methods, I turn your attention to Cavalia. I stumbled on this organization because they did a show in the D.C. area a few years ago and I adore horse shows. Blew. My. Mind. They perform with stallions, off lead and unbridled. Nothing separating us the audience from the stallions than a two-foot “wall”. The videos on the site show the horses all mounted, but the first act in the show I saw was this:
Stallions enter the arena one by one, no humans. They trot across the arena, bugling and nipping at each other, and then gradually settle into orderly trotting around the periphery of the arena. When they’re all going around nicely, the humans come in. A couple of the acts featured the humans walking and the horses following in formations with no lead or bridles.
If they can do this with stallions full of testosterone and reputations as being hard to handle, imagine what you can do with dogs! There’s no excuse in the world for beating an animal to make it do what you want.
I smacked my dog on the butt ONCE. And that was because she was trying to wrestle with the cat, and I need to get her to stop before the cat got hurt. (The dog wasn’t be viscious, she just wanted to play) I didn’t even hit her that hard.
My aunt and uncle had a rescue dog that had been trained as a puppy using a shock collar. When they got her, she was extremely skittish and shy, and terrified of most men she didn’t know. (It even took her awhile to warm up to my uncle)
Keep in mind one of the paths to domestication of dogs was culling those that were vicious or un-trainable. It’s a good assumption that dogs were beaten in the old days, and often killed, for non-performance or being dangerous.
Perhaps the dogs we have around today are a result of this process - maybe they are getting MORE agreeable, less dangerous, and easier to train with each successive generation (e.g the ones that do not conform are not allowed to breed). Of course, we are also spaying and neutering a lot of compliant animals that cannot pass-on their genes.
I don’t think that’s an accurate observation. A good way to ensure a dog is mean is to beat it. A dog that’s coddled, like my two, are just the most friendly things in the world. A dog that’s been treated well tends to think that all people are nice. They don’t have much imagination like we do, so it doesn’t occur to them that a human could be anything other than nice to them. Same thing for dogs that have been mistreated, like Michael Vick’s fighting dogs. Although some of them were rehabilitated, it’s a lot of work to teach a dog that’s been brutalized, that not all humans cause pain.
I don’t think this is a true statement. Coddling a dog is fine as long as it is not always on his terms. Some dogs are just nice and some dogs are not so nice and it has little to do with how they are treated.