Obedience Can’t Be Trained nor Measured
Traditional training says “teach a dog some tricks and commands, and you’ll have a dog with ‘the basics’ in place, and you’ll have an obedient dog.” This, however, begs the elephant-in-the-room question, “based on what foundation?”
Opinions Aren’t Facts
Readers who’ve judged the content of the article as useless, foolish, or worthless are readers whose opinions have unconsciously become their facts. If you’re still reading this with an open mind, great!
Opinions are not fact. (Unconsciously) treating and defending opinions as facts is unfortunately quite common; it’s a temporary part of the human experience in terms of its immediate, hourly duration as well as its long term, generational duration during which it seems to have arisen and become mired in the behavioral and beliefs landscapes.
Obedience Training—What Is It?
I don’t know what obedience training is. I doubt any traditional trainer is going to be able to define and defend obedience training in any manner that repeatedly explains it the same way from any sufficiently large group of traditional trainers.
Dogs don’t become obedient from the teaching and the doing of tricks. Dogs don’t become obedient by doing commands. That they become obedient through the doing of tricks is an unconscious grey area we’ve adopted as acceptable, okay, and good, when it’s none of those. Still, the use of the term and the promotion of the value in obedience training remains. How sad.
How Are Dogs Judged as Obedient?
Dogs seem to be judged as obedient or not based on how their energy levels are over a period of time. If a person watches a dog for a short length of time, the way they interact with their owners and their surroundings will result in that observer claiming, “that dog seems obedient,” or not.
The Old Way of Obedience
Teach a dog a few commands and tricks, and there you have it—an obedient dog.
The Revealing Questions
If people think that the doing of commands and tricks is the thing that results in a dog that’s obedient, when the measurement of a dog, being obedient or not, is based on how the dog acts over a 1 to 2 week period, then how can the instantaneous doing of tricks show anything over time? It can’t, and that’s the confounding and elusive thought process which—although it shows the faulty thinking—most won’t have the patience to think through.
How Is Obedience Measured?
That’s the litmus test. There is no measure of obedience. If it can’t be measured, it can’t be talked about.
Measurable obedience isn’t real. However, it *IS* possible to look at any dog and get a gut feeling for whether that dog is obedient or not.
Obedience Is an Indicator Only
There’s no way to say a dog is a zero level obedience dog, or a five level obedience dog, or a ten level obedience dog. However, it is possible to judge a dog in a yes-no way on the continuum of obedience. That that’s possible supports the original argument that obedience is about a dog’s energy level.
When obedience is an indicator, when a person looks at a dog and says, “that dog seems obedient,” the establishing of the indicator of obedience is equivalent to saying, “that dog is at a zero to five energy level,” which in the RDL, Reflective Dog Leadership model—which is based on Nature—is the dog’s low energy range, where Nature isn’t driving the physical dog to do wild, out of control, reflexive, undesirable things, its brain is present and in control, and problems essentially go away.