Back in the late 90s, some University friends and I got this idea to start a club, and the OSU Society for Logic and Reason was born. We were just kids who believed that reason, evidence, and intellectual honesty mattered more than comfortable narratives. We wrote a Declaration of Necessity that warned against “a flight from reason and the principles of the Enlightenment” and “striving to replace science with pseudo-science, knowledge with ignorance.”
We brought James Randi to campus to speak. We used funds to build a library of books for aspiring humanists, skeptics, atheists, and the like. I got to go to Chicago to hear Richard Dawkins talk about this weird idea called “memes.” (Yeah, that aged interestingly.). I used my mad photoshop and web design skills to make the logo and the website
Fast forward to the Kynology event that will be this week at Agility Challenge Acres in Ohio! Stewart Hilliard and Forrest Micke – serious thinkers applying comparative psychology, animal welfare science, and ethics to their “Agency-Accountability Framework”. It’s everything that “Declaration of Necessity” was about, just applied to dogs instead of humans.
The dog training world needs what we needed back then – encouragement to be thoughtful vs reactive, to value clarity over comfort, to ask hard questions without shame. Real understanding that creates deeper fulfillment than surface level feel-good quick fix promises ever could.
We’re seeing a cultural trend everywhere – it’s easier to substitute nuanced understanding with simplified dogma, shame people for asking hard questions, to prioritize ideology over outcomes. This isn’t a problem limited to dog training. It’s human nature to take the path of least resistance, and we’re surrounded by examples of short form clickbait that encourage us to think and behave in similar ways.
20+ years later, I’m still striving toward those same principles. I still fall short regularly, but I keep striving. How about you?