Puppy Love at the Veep’s House
by Amy Argetsinger and Roxanne Roberts
The Reliable Source
Washington Post
Wed., March 18, 2009
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/reliable-source/2009/03/rs-champ18.html
Kudos to the Veep for planning to get 3-month-old Champ an adopted companion instead of one from a breeder. (No, I know that not all breeders are bad, but with all the animals discarded by society who land in shelters, those are clearly the #1 kinds of places to look first!)
Glad to hear Champ is learning his ABCs. I looked up trainer Mark Tobin’s K-9 Camp Dog Obedience School, where Champ is enrolled, and while it’s good to see the claim to using “only positive training methods designed to be non-confrontational,” I have to question why choker and pinch collars are considered acceptable. If I’m not mistaken, the world’s top trainers and behaviorists — folks like Ian Dunbar, Jean Donaldson, Karen Pryor, Patricia McConnell, Pat Miller, Turid Rugaas and others — all oppose these types of collars. Head collars and Martingales are much more preferred.
There are plenty of interesting comments on The Ultimate Dog Blog. Here’s one that I think responds to the issue in a well-reasoned manner:
OCTOBER 7TH, 2008 AT 5:24 PM
Other trainers? Your two-cents’-worth?
dogwordz 
Choke collars, prong collars, and e-collars can all be highly effective training tools, but they are easy to misuse or abuse. It always comes back to one thing, the competence of the trainer. If the trainer is incompetent, the only question is the cost of failure to the dog. First, do no harm. Some people are simply unable to maintain the level of focus, attentiveness, emotional control, patience, and consistency it takes to train a dog. They may be fine folks in other respects, but dog training is just something they are not mentally or emotionally equipped to do. The advantage of positive reinforcement techniques over the various control collars is that when the incompetent trainer finally throws in the towel and gives up, he only leaves behind a dog that is untrained, not one that has been physically injured or made vicious.