Social media dog trainers are popping up more and more regularly – but are they helping or hindering you with their training posts and updates?
As we move into into a brand New Year, we’ll all start being pushed messages about how to improve, be better, work harder, do more, achieve more, change.
And there’ll likely be messages from dog trainers hitting your inboxes or on your social media platforms in the coming days and weeks about how to change your dogs’ behaviour or finally nail that training.
Or challenges to help you overcome some training issue.
Which is great if you’re both enjoying it.
But it can also bring up feelings for dog owners of not being good enough when we don’t get the results we want.
We all know about the issues around social media when it comes to making people feel like they’re not living their best life, or keeping up with unrealistic expectations set by influencers. But what about in dog training?
It’s just the same.
Is social media helping or hindering your dog training?
Social media shows trainers working with their perfect dogs, snippets of videos which are just moments in time. I’ve been to in person training with some of these ‘famous’ trainers who have been on TV and are social media influencers, and the reality was different. One of them had a demo dog that kept wandering off hassling trainees’ dogs – whilst telling us about how to develop more control over our dogs’ behaviour. And the other was a downright rude misery guts who mad everyone training there feel small and humiliated.
Social media dog training posts can make us feel overwhelmed – on any given day there are SO MANY ads for dog training programmes, memberships and free programmes.
It is overwhelming! Even if they’re free, it’s overwhelming. Hours and hours of videos, lots of commitments to having the perfect dog by the end of the course.
No more pulling, no more barking, no more reactivity.
No more behaviour.
The reality is that it’s pretty impossible to create huge behavioural change in a short space of time, following an online course.
There – I said it.
So why is that? Well, it relies on you as the owner knowing exactly what your dog’s behavioural issue is being caused by.
Does online dog training work for you?
I often see situations where the owner believes XYZ is the cause of the behaviour when it’s sometimes something completely different. Are you able to tell frustration reactivity from fear-based reactivity? Are you able to see which of your own behaviours is reinforcing what your dog is doing?
We often need an outside view from an external trainer to see what we’re doing wrong or what needs adjusting. I do myself – we’re often too close to the issue to see it ourselves.
But we miss that in person realtime feedback with full online training so we can often get to the end of the online course and still find ourselves facing challenges. Or we don’t make it to the end because we can’t get past the foundations so we fall down when tackling more complex training.
And that is COMPLETELY UNDERSTANDABLE. Dog training seems simple, but it’s not. If you’re following advice and not making progress, then it’s because you need a little outside guidance to refine a few things. I bet it’s just a minor change that once pointed out will be so easy for you to correct.
But again, with online ‘transmit-only’ training, we don’t get that. We get the perfect trainer’s dog, not our dog sat in front of us.
I have the same issue myself when I try to film training stuff about teaching focus work as my own dogs have been so trained in focusing on me and eye contact that it doesn’t help someone start out with their dog who doesn’t offer eye contact.
So don’t feel bad that you’re not keeping up with social media ideals about how well trained your dog should be. And if it’s starting to make you feel bad about yourself and your progress instead of good and enthused, then that’s the time to step away from the ‘gram.
Focus on what you’ve achieved with your dog, not the gap
Many dog owners consuming these training posts focus on the gap between where we’re told we SHOULD be and the reality of what we can achieve in real life.
Sometimes that ‘gap’ is down to what’s realistic for your dog and their genetic makeup and history. Not all dogs are as trainable as others, and some are more predisposed to certain behaviours than others.
And some of it’s down to you and what you have the energy and capacity for at the end of every day. We’re not robots.
And unlike professional dog trainers, this isn’t your full time job so you still have to go out and work and clean and blah blah, and come home and train your dogs.
New Years Resolutions for Dog Owners
What I propose instead for the New Year, is that instead of worrying about improving and pushing all the time, imagine instead if you put that energy towards finding more FUN, in your own, and your dog’s life.
On focusing on the things you BOTH enjoy doing together, even if that doesn’t involve ‘getting better’ at something.
It might be that you find you really enjoy trick training indoors with your reactive dog and decide to double down on that rather than working relentlessly on their reactivity.
Or that you decide to change those awful daily walks with big barking and lunging reactions for three long, calm walks a week in the woods.
This isn’t me saying do nothing. That you should just accept all bad behaviour. That we should just accept reactivity and not try and do anything. Absolutely not, but…
We often forget to focus on any of the good parts of our ‘challenging’ dogs. We’re always focused on what needs to change. On where we need to get them to.
And that changes our perspective of our dogs and who they are. We just see the problems and the bad stuff. The dogs that they are not.
There’s more to reactive dog training than just reactive dog training
We forget about other training opportunities and activities we could be doing instead. We forget that there’s a world of training out there that doesn’t have to be stressful that you can do instead, or in addition to the training you’re working on already. Like Scentwork or Hoopers. Reactive dogs need to have fun too! And so do reactive dog owners.
These expectations that we put on ourselves as owners can stress us out, and our dogs.
So I’m giving you a different New Year’s suggestion to try and enjoy your time together this year with your dog as much as you can. The time with our dogs is fleeting so how can we improve the time we have with them, and also make ourselves feel better so we can look back with fondness and pride in what we achieved together with our dogs – however cheeky, difficult, challenging, barky or naughty they may be.
