We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

— Carl Sagan.

Hello, everyone!

Welcome to Scrutinizing the Science, where I’ll be reviewing scientific publications about dog training. There’s an incredible level of polarization in the dog training world, where purely positive/force free advocates and balanced trainers butt heads on a regular basis, often leading to bullying, harassment, and occasionally threats of violence. There are numerous lies and vast amounts of misinformation circulating about training tools and methods. I don’t want to get into the ethical arguments here, but I will use this platform to address some of the fatal flaws in the scientific research being conducted on dog training. Each entry will be focused on a particular peer-reviewed paper or group of papers, which I will summarize and scrutinize for my readers.

Here’s a bit about me: I grew up with dogs, started working with horses starting in high school, and have spent a lot of my free time over the years absorbing everything I can from numerous horse and dog trainers. My philosophy has always been to listen to what experts have to say, reflect, ask questions, and store the information until it becomes useful. Some of that information will NEVER be used, just as there are some tools I would NEVER put on my animals, but I have always found it important to understand the proper use of every tool that may come into my life, whether I’m dog sitting or riding a horse whose owner requires the use of said tool. Regardless, I believe we can learn something from everyone, even if it’s that we learn we do not agree with what someone else has to say.

My personal dogs are both “rescues” and mainly German Shepherd Dogs. They each came to me with no basic obedience and a number of behavioral issues, ranging from unreliable house training to extreme dog reactivity (which some trainers may have labeled as aggression). I started out thinking I’d try purely positive training methods, and quickly learned that a 90 pound highly reactive dog in a dog-dense neighborhood in a major city was not going to be rehabilitated with cookies, and I would not be able to afford legal fees or stomach the idea of rehoming or euthanizing an animal that could be retrained using other methods. Now we live in a tiny cabin on a horse farm where there are 20+ horses, 10 other dogs, barn cats, pigs, chickens, and all the vermin my boys could ever want to hunt. The dogs coexist peacefully with all of the humans and animals on the farm (except the rats…), spend rainy days happily in my small home, participate in sheep herding and barn hunt, and one of them is now my service dog who accompanies me when I travel around the country for work and pleasure (see @themobiustrips on Instagram to follow our daily lives!). We’re working towards earning titles in barn hunt and will hopefully begin doing some low level trialing in herding next season. I trained my dogs using balanced methods, including prong and ecollar work, and have helped train dog and human reactive foster dogs using the same methods for the rescue I volunteer with.

My scientific background is quite intense and diverse. I spent my undergraduate years participating in biomechanics research, and my honors thesis research was published. I started a PhD program in ecology and evolutionary biology, but left after a couple of years when I realized, among other things, how detrimental academic bias is to scientific progress. Some of my graduate research was published, and I moved onto working in pathology and psychiatry, where more of the research I worked on was published. I have spent countless hours reading and analyzing peer-reviewed scientific publications and discussing results with my colleagues. I have taken numerous courses on statistics and experimental design, and take pride in my ability to find weak spots in both. While I am no longer an active participant in scientific research, I love keeping up on research in areas I’m passionate about.

I envision that this blog will be a place for me to share my love for science and dog training, encourage those of you who use “science-based dog training” or who are attacked for not using “science-based dog training” to learn more about what the science actually says (or doesn’t say), and promote sound scientific research in the world of dog training. I also hope this will be a positive conversation starter and a place where people who love their dogs, professional or not, can have open and fair conversations about training. Harassment and bullying will NOT be tolerated, so please keep any comments and discussions civil. If you would like to share PDFs or links to articles with me, please send those to themobiustrips@gmail.com. If you are a fellow science-brained dog lover and would like to contribute to this blog, please let me know!