“You’re so lucky! Your job must be so cool!” There are lots and lots of dog lovers out there and they get a far-away dreamy look in their eyes at their idea of what a dog trainer does for a living. It’s true, I do feel fortunate to work with dogs, but not for the reasons you may think.
When you envision a dog trainer’s work, what do you see? I’ve had people tell me that they think I play with puppies all day. (Okay, sometimes I do.) Others picture a dour headmistress barking orders in a militaristic manner, a la Barbara Woodhouse or the dog trainer from that fabulous Simpson’s episode where Bart takes Santa’s Little Helper to a training class. There is also the idea of a dog trainer as “pack leader” hiking in nature, surrounded by a large group of dogs as if under a magical spell.
Of course, none of these images truly reflects what it is that my colleagues and I do on a daily basis. The truth is, as a dog trainer I’m actually a people trainer. It’s up to me to teach people how to best communicate their wishes and expectations to their canine companions. It’s also my job to help people understand normal dog behavior and how to best channel doggy desires into activities that are not annoying or gross to us humans and not dangerous to dogs. In a very real sense, dog trainers serve as cross-species interpreters or mediators.
Because dogs live with people, it’s people who make the rules for dogs. Humans control key resources such as food and toys, as well as access to other dogs, the outdoors, and special adventures. People determine where dogs sleep, what and when they eat, and where they go (or don’t get to go).
It is people who control the domestic world that most dogs live in; the world that my student-dogs live in, at any rate. It is people who have very specific ideas about how dogs ought to behave in our human society and so they are always trying to mold normal dog behavior to fit.
It is people who decide whether or not to devote time and energy to training and exercising a dog so he can successfully be called “a good dog” and happily stay in their home -– or whether he will end up unwanted in a shelter, his life hanging in the balance. And again it is people who ultimately decide whether a shelter dog will live or die.
So it’s my job to make training fun at both ends of the leash. If training is fun people will do it more often and dogs will like it much better and gleefully respond to their owners’ requests with enthusiasm.
It’s my job to teach people to break down training goals into clear bite-size exercises that can be easily practiced, mastered, and built upon to ensure clarity of expectations and success.
It’s my job to make sure people understand that the success of any training exercise or program lies fully in the hands of the human teacher, not the canine student, that the dog is never responsible for a failure in training. Dogs are excellent mirrors, and you will always get what you train. It’s up to us humans, with our bigger brains and opposable thumbs, to figure out how to problem solve, how to make an exercise clearer or perhaps more motivating to the dog.
Good training enhances the relationship between dogs and humans and that is what my job is all about. So whether I’m teaching sweet little milk-breathed puppies the all-important life skills that all dogs need to live safely and soundly around humans (such as impulse control, tractability, and how use their jaws gently), or teaching people how to embrace their dog’s utter fascination with everything olfactory in a Sirius® Sniffers Sherlock Nose class, I know that I am positively influencing the dog/human bond and increasing the dog’s chance of staying out of an animal shelter.
That is what I do for a living.
Kelly Gorman Dunbar is Director of the Center for Applied Animal Behavior, where she recruits and trains the instructors for the Dunbar family business, SIRIUS® Puppy & Dog Training. She is the creator of the SIRIUS Sniffers scent-detection program, and is in the process of bringing the French sport of cavage (truffle hunting) to the US. Kelly is also Founder and President of Open Paw and consults on various matters.
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