Experts in dog behavior?

[crysania4]

There are a lot of books and websites out there written by a wide variety of people, from the laymen to those who claim they are experts when it's pretty clear they're not. So I'm curious. Who would you consider to be the real experts in dog/canine behavior? The people who really GET it, who maybe even have the degrees to back up their books or

Comments

[caninepawprints]

Karen Pryor is a big one.

I'm also fond of Jan Fennel.

[smirnoffmule]

Jan Fennell is really a disputable one. There's no scientific basis to the kind of pack leadership stuff she practises. She's a gimmicky trainer IMHO -she puts everything down to dominance, and treats everything with her own trademarked rank reduction programme. People I would consider to be real experts have a much wider knowledge, and a basis in science for what they do.

[caninepawprints]

Can you elaborate on the scientific background you're talking about?

[smirnoffmule]

Jan Fennell claims in one of her books to have come up with her method after watching a documentary about wolves on the telly. She has no academic background in zoology or psychology, unlike trainers like Dunbar, McConnell, or O'Heare.

[caninepawprints]

I think the book you're thinking about is "The Dog Listener." It's a compilation of two of her works that are no longer in print separately, if I remember right

[smirnoffmule]

"The Dog Listener" is the first book she ever wrote. It's not a compilation. She says nothing much at all about modern methods in it - her criticisms are of traditional methods involving choke chains etc that she found to be ineffective. And actually, as she tells it in the book, she watched the documentary one day and implimented her plan the next. I doubt it was as simple as that, especially since her rank reduction programme is hardly an original one, but one that had been used by other trainers before her for decades. That's one of the many things about her book that's rather questionable - she claims her realisation about the parallels between wolf and dog behaviour was a revelation, but all that suggests to me is she can't ever have read a book on dog training before in her life.

[caninepawprints]

I had to go look at my copy of the book to see where the confusion may have come in about it being a compilation, and I see where I looked at it incorrectly. There is a separate section in the back that is a 30-day training guide that seemed like a book in itself when I first read it a couple of years ago

[silverblaidd]

The fact that she follows dominance theory, and tries to apply watching wolf behavior to dog training, proves that she's not a reputable trainer, and she most certainly is not a behaviorist. It's been proven time and again that dominance theory is unfounded and misguided. There is no more debate about it. It's a fact. Any trainer or any person calling themselves a behaviorist (and Jan Fennel cannot, she doesn't have anything to back it up with) that says otherwise is flat out uneducated.

[caninepawprints]

I don't recall Fennel ever saying she was a behaviorist. Her methods come about from watching both wolves and dogs, not just wolves

[rozae]

The problem I see with her training methods is that they are based on something proven to be false. You may very well be able to bring about change in a dog by following her outdated training techniques. Unfortunately, because you are following something that is fundamentally wrong you are not likely to get to the root cause of the dog's problems

[caninepawprints]

You're right. I'm not certain this describes Fennel and her methods, but I agree with what you've stated. I'll have to review her books again and go from there. It's been a couple of years since I've read them and my understanding of them then may be different from what they would be today.

[rozae]

I find that I come away with something different each time I read a book. I'm not sure if that's due to changes in myself or my current outlook on life (or a little of both). Either way, it is often worthwhile. You never know what you might find that you previously overlooked. :]

[caninepawprints]

That's very true. I often don't read books more than once unless it affected me in some way, and I've found that when I do reread them, I always bring away something different than I did the first time through, just like you said. And when it's been a few years since you last picked up a book, there's no telling what you may or may not recall from it. Sometimes things you remember reading in it aren't even there but were in another book altogether.

[rozae]

Good point. I often take quotes from books when I find a part that is particularly interesting or moving. That way I can easily find it later (either in my journal and grouped by tags or on my pc with minimal hunting).

[silverblaidd]

Actually, there are such things as wrong theories and ideas, and dominance based ideas are one of them. Using a false idea as a basis for any method is faulty. I'm not sure what else there is to explain about this. Dominance Theory is wrong. People who use Dominance Theory as a platform for training, or trying to understand dogs, are going to get it wrong. It's simply going to result in diagnosing and treating problems in error. Just because it looks like it's working to a layperson does not mean that it is, and before deciding if it was working, I'd prefer to see it myself or have it evaluated by someone qualified. Preferably the latter as to avoid any perceived bias. Additionally, just because someone doesn't use the more popular, and ofter harsher, techniques of training that accompany this method doesn't mean the method is sound.

[coendou]

I'm not trying to be an education snob or anything, but the quantity and type of reading on a subject that you do while getting your PhD from a reputable school is in an entirely different universe than what 99.9% of people would do themselves when studying up on a topic out of personal interest. I'm only 2.5 years into mine, and I have read probably a good 500 dense scientific articles in that time and will probably read at least that many more before defending my dissertation. And that is on top of the fact that you actually do your own original research, which lets you understand the methodologies used and what makes a study good or bad in a way that just reading can't.

I don't know anything about Jan Fennel, but I would question whether anyone without formal training at all could possibly have read as widely or deeply on the topic as someone with a doctorate.