You’ve heard people say it. “I didn’t use any punishment.” “I only had to correct her twice.” “I only pull out a tool when I really need to.” Or maybe, “I taught this behavior in only two sessions” or something like “I’ve rewarded my dog 10,000 times for a recall”.
As if the number is the proof. And that the math is: fewer corrections, better trainer. More reinforcements, happier dog.
I don’t really care, at the end of the day, how many reinforcements or how many punishments somebody used. That’s counting what went INTO the dog. It doesn’t tell you what came OUT.
You see the same thing with play. Posts telling you that throwing a ball for your dog is wrong, or that a toy on a rope is the ‘wrong kind of toy‘. Same mistake. It judges the game by whether it follows the latest popular advice, not by what it does for the dog in front of you.
So here’s the scoreboard I actually use:
- Does the dog, on the whole, have a good life?
- When the dog works, is it happy? Eager? Motivated?
- Does the dog WANT to do this? Does the dog drag you to the startline, or do you have to talk the dog into the game?
- Does the dog’s behavior hold up when it matters? At a trial, in a new building, with a crowd, not just in your yard on a Tuesday.
I’ll leave you with this: If someone took away the tally, the cookie count, the correction count, the list of approved games, all of it, and just watched you and your dog for a week (not a moment in time, not a single run, or a single day at a competition, but over a period of time, whether it’s a week, a month, or a YEAR), what would they see?
That’s the only metric that matters.
So tell me: has anyone ever judged you or YOUR dog by one moment, without knowing the full story? What’s the full story? Leave a comment!
This is the scoreboard we use inside The Agility Challenge. The door is here.