In the past 20 years, a lot of new people have come into the market as dog trainers. I remember when I first started out, there weren’t that many. Something changed around 2005… I blame the internet.
What I saw happen over the years was the self-promoting Dog Training Marketing Guru trend. New people, with little to no experience in dog training, put all their efforts into marketing. These days, it is people who spend a lot of time and effort creating a presence on social media. They seem to come out of nowhere, and suddenly, they are proclaiming they are “master trainers”.
If you do a bit of research into their backgrounds, most have almost no experience sufficient to train anyone’s dog, much less their own. Most pick one of the following approaches: 1.) all suppressive (forcing down a dog’s instincts and actions with some kind of force), 2.) all “positive” (without knowing what that really means or how to implement that), or 3.) promoting their mystical psychic powers with animals. It is all a bluff, but many unsuspecting dog owners will hire them off these marketing efforts and let their dogs be experimented on by these novices.
Here is what is true. You can’t be a good dog trainer by attending a seminar. You aren’t going to be a good dog trainer just because your retail business calls you one after their 90-day training initiation. You can’t become a good dog trainer with a 6-month dog training program. It just doesn’t work that way. To be good, meaning you know what you are talking about and can show verifiable results for specific problems, you must put in the time, effort, passion, heartbreaks, successes, study, work, and experience.
It took me many years to become comfortable with what I know today. I know how it feels to work your way up to being good. If you asked these new people, and if they were being honest with you, they would tell you they feel insecure about what they know, and they would admit they felt like imposters. They aren’t what they claim to be… yet.
Every good dog trainer hears reports from their students about other dog trainers they have either talked with or hired. There is so much silly and uneducated advice given out, I could write many articles about all that jazz. But I’ve also been around too many years to get upset about it. I’ve got better things to do.
If you are new to this topic, let me explain my solution to all of this with an example:
I was discussing with someone recently about finding a wife. He is in his late 30’s, never been married. Here’s what I told him. “I think it’s a mistake for a man to go out there and seek a woman. Because then you’re chasing after them and that looks weak. I think it’s weak for man to go to church to find a wife. Or to go to a restaurant or go to a club or a bar or a beach or a store… you are there for the wrong reasons… that is all backwards and is weakness.”
His response? “If you don’t seek a woman, how do you expect to find one? Good luck finding a good woman these days not at church or on a dating site where you can filter interests. But dating sites suck and are full of superficial people.”
My final answer: “I think good women find good males when the males have made themselves ready, regardless of where you are. Improve yourself. Walk like a man. Talk like a man. Build an empire. They will come. Do rock stars go on dating sites? Become ready and the wife you want will appear.”
This is how it works in the animal kingdom, and it is how it works with people. Today, we see all these macho men posing on the internet as if they are these Alpha males, and they try to sell you their course on how strut around, falsify their credentials and personality, to pick up women. Yes, some women will fall for that, but it won’t last, and they will get hurt along the way. Some women do it, too, in their own way. You can scroll through social media and see countless examples of women who aren’t wife material strutting their stuff. These efforts will attract the wrong kind of men. Our society doesn’t need more broken families.
Similarly, it works better this way when becoming a dog trainer. If the trainer focuses on being good, the customers will find them. They don’t put up a false front, and they won’t take on dogs they aren’t prepared to handle. No one gets hurt. I tell new trainers to not do the mega marketing ploy. Don’t be a phony, don’t pretend to be something that you are not. It will backfire.
Remember this…
“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”
― Abraham Lincoln