Bark! Fest Recording: Culture Clash and Beyond with Jean Donaldson
Watch or listen to the recording of the panel at Bark! Fest, the book festival for animal lovers, with Jean Donaldson talking about The Culture Clash.
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| Zazie Todd, Jean Donaldson, and Kristi Benson hold up copies of The Culture Clash and, in Zazie's case, Bark! |
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Bark! Fest with Jean Donaldson
Bark! Fest, the book festival for animal lovers, took place in September 2024 with 11 author panels (and one tricks class from the amazing Erica Beckwith of A Matter of Manners Dog Training). It was organized to celebrate the launch of my new book, Bark! The Science of Helping Your Anxious, Fearful, or Reactive Dog, which is out now and available from all good bookstores.
This is the recording of the very first session, Culture Clash and Beyond with special guest Jean Donaldson.
You can watch the recording on Youtube or below, and listen to the recording wherever you get your podcasts (Apple) or below. Closed captions are available on Youtube. You can also scroll down to read some of the highlights of the discussion.
We talked about:
- why Jean wrote her book The Culture Clash
- what the Transparency Challenge is and why it's so important for dog trainers to answer these questions
- her advice to someone who is struggling with their dog's behaviour
- what is distinctive about the Academy for Dog Trainers
- a writing tip
- her favourite thing that's changed in the world of dog training over the years
- and she answered lots of questions from the audience
Get the books
All of the Bark! Fest books are available from good bookstores, including from Bookshop (which supports independent bookstores), UK Bookshop, and my Amazon store.
Resources mentioned
The Great Courses Dog Training 101
The ultimate dog training tip (Companion Animal Psychology)
Emily Priestley Wild at Heart Dog Training and her book, Urban Sheepdog (see also our recent podcast with Emily, What you need to know about herding dogs)
Cooperative Paws by Veronica Sanchez
If you like this, you might also like to see the Bark! Fest recording of Dogs, trauma, and both ends of the leash with Patricia McConnell PhD.
Many thanks to everyone who came to Bark! Fest and made it such a wonderful event, and special thanks to Jean Donaldson for this beautiful and important discussion.
Highlights of the conversation with Jean Donaldson
Z: So can we start by going back to when you were writing The Culture Clash? Because this is a book that so many people have told me that this book changed their approach to dog training. And a lot of trainers who used aversives have told me that this is the book that made them switch to using reward based methods. But the world was very different when you were writing this book.
So can you take us back to that moment and say what it was like? What was the backdrop and why did you write this book?
J: We have to go back to 1992. There was a guy, a prominent trainer I knew from the obedience trial circuit. He was quoted in a magazine and this is word for word, if you use food to train, the dog is doing it for the food and not for you.
Now I had been participating in sports with my dogs. I'd been teaching classes, doing cases for many years by that point. And it had become apparent to me that dogs didn't just do stuff like a two minute heeling routine just to please us. So I felt there was a fiction going on. And I knew this guy and I knew how he trained. It was with a choke collar, and he was pretty relentless, and his dogs were pretty joyless.
I must say that he believed his dogs were cranking out obedience patterns for him. It really stuck in my craw that food would somehow corrupt the dog's noble impulse to do these tricks for this guy's pleasure. And that this sort of invented platonic dog who wasn't just bonded to people and didn't just love us, but who could be solely motivated by our happiness, was in fact being basically tortured by pain and strangulation devices to maintain this illusion.
It just about made me physically sick. So fast forward a few years and I wrote that book as an attempt to pull the curtain back.
K: So, Jean, at the beginning of Culture Clash, which was... I just. I know this isn't part of our script, but I just wanted to say I was one of the people who, I felt like my mind was really cranked open when I read this book. Not only was it just, like, such good information, and it made so much sense to me as someone who, you know, I was a social scientist.
And so I appreciated the fact that it made sense instead of it just being, you know, I had probably read like 50 dog books by that point, and. And I was just constantly judging myself, like, why can't I make my dogs do what they say I should be able to do in these books, right? I was, like, confused and kind of, like, down on myself. And then I read this book and I was just like, oh, it was kind of a, this big relief.
It makes sense. It gives us a path forward, you know, so it was a really important book for me too.
So you start this book, The Culture Clash, by talking about this Disneyfication of dogs. And do you think that's still an issue today?
J: I would say much less now. There are definitely whiffs of it in the force training crowd when they pour scorn on food. So they might use words like dependence on the food and so on. All behavior depends on outcomes. And the stuff we want dogs to do is often, as we often say in applied behavior, expensive behavior. There's always motivation. The only difference is how upfront we are about it.
Z: Yep, sure. Okay. And so a while ago, the Academy created the Transparency Challenge, which was shared all over the place, and it's calling on dog trainers to be more transparent about their methods. So, as you just said, it depends on changing behavior. Depends on something. So can you tell us about those questions that you set up in the Transparency Challenge and why they're so important?
J: The idea behind them is consumer protection. So the three questions are these:
- What will happen to my dog when she gets it right?
- What will happen to her when she gets it wrong?
- Are there any less invasive alternatives to what you propose?
So this is our questions that the public should pose to dog trainers. Basically, it's about informed consent. In more recent years, as training without aversives has caught on, those who are dependent on aversives are resorting to murkier and murkier language in their marketing materials to conceal what they're actually doing. So you'll see weaselly words like natural or leadership or energy and so on.
The questions are designed to get concrete about how the trainer is planning to motivate your dog. What events in the physical world are going to happen when the dog gets it wrong, most specifically? And some trainer says, well, there's just going to be leadership.
[Feline interlude]
K: Lack of transparency is a real issue for ordinary dog guardians. And I know that was part of the reason why you came up with the three question challenge. So as well as asking those three questions, what do you think dog guardians should do to protect themselves from aversive strangers? Because they are, like you said, I think they've painted themselves into a corner. They're starting to use other language. You know, so, so what can someone do without getting a Ph.D. essentially in, in how the dog professional world is working?
J: Yeah. I would say don't be cowed or bullied by these people. If they say to you that your dog, quote unquote, has to be corrected or that electric shock doesn't actually hurt, or that it's just a tap on the shoulder, run away. There are better alternatives.
If your dog comes back from a board and train or something worse than he was or now he is afraid on top of being worse, report that trainer. Report them to whatever organization they belong to. Write a review. Tell others on social media it's not okay, it's malpractice, it's not your fault, it's the trainer. And if it's really egregious, I would even say call a lawyer.
Z: Yeah, I think that's good advice. And many people call in a dog trainer precisely because they are struggling with their dog's behavior. And some behavior issues can be very difficult for ordinary people to deal with. So aside from finding a good trainer, which as we know is tricky because of that murky language, what other advice do you have for someone who is struggling with their dog's behavior?
J: Know that our technology now is better than it ever has been and so they should try and find a certified non aversive behavior practitioner. There's a referral list on the Academy site. There's a referral list on the Pet Professional Guild site and also on the sites of non aversive schools, things like Karen Pryor Academy, Victoria Stilwell Academy. The trainer's site should specify no aversives will be used. So terms like force free or no pain, no fear, and so on. And ask those three questions and make sure that the answers that you get are clear and concrete and understandable.
K: One thing we often hear currently is that there's this increase in fearful and anxious dogs. Now this I don't, as far as I know, there hasn't been an actual study on this, so it's hard to quantify. But what's your impression about numbers of fearful dogs? You know, sort of related to the past?
J: I do think I've seen what you're describing and I don't know, like you, there's not been research to my knowledge. My guess is that it's partly we're doing a better job of catching and diagnosing anxiety disorders and getting them appropriate treatment. VBs are more accessible. There are more of them than ever before. There might also be maybe a bit of a pendulum swing and some over diagnosis going on. But again, I actually don't know.
Z: It's hard to know, isn't it? And that's something that I hear quite often. But because there isn't a specific piece of research that like compares the past to now, there's no way to tell for sure. Yeah. Thank you. It's good to get your impressions on that.
And now I want to ask you about the Academy for Dog Trainers because I'm very, very lucky to be a graduate of the Academy for Dog Trainers. Kristi is too, and Kristi is now a staff member there as well. I could not have picked a better school to go to. I'm so very, very happy that I went to the Academy and I learned so much from being there.
But we have a huge lot of your fans here. So I'm hoping that you can just say something about the academy and about what is distinctive about the Academy is dog training curriculum.
J: I would say it's a deeper dive into the whys about animal behavior as well as how to work more complex cases. We also supervise the practice of our graduates. I coach my grads on cases every day. So I guess I would say it's for prospective trainers who are really curious about how behavior works and who are interested in taking on more challenging work with dog guardians.
Z: Yeah, thank you. I would say that.
K: Yeah. And I think there's a strength in the counseling modules too. You know, I'm working with humans. I mean, we work with humans almost exclusively. I don't know any dog trainers who don't work with people. And one of the things that reading all these books for Bark! Fest, Zazie, that's really been hammered home to me when I'm reading books by people who are in our profession, our professional colleagues, is there's a lot more attention to people.
I mean, there's some, I think, other great things and I hope Jean will talk about this a bit more. Like there really is a lot more sort of bandwidth given to the fact that dogs are dogs and they have needs and we should allow them to meet their own needs and be dogs. But also there's this, like, people are important and they're not evil and we can love working with people as dog trainers. So I think that's a really cool part of the Academy too.
Z: And if I can add a part too, I would say also just the community and the community that you have with other trainers and the chance to go and get feedback on something if you need it, or just to, you know, let off steam about something if you need to.
And just the friendship amongst the people, I think is one of the best things that you're still part of this community after you've graduated. You're not sent off loose into the world. You're still part of it. Which I think, you know, for me is incredible. So thank you, Jean.
J: Thank you.
K: So when I was looking at these questions yesterday and just thinking about what I really wanted to know, I just, it occurred to me that things have changed. You always say that things have changed since you wrote this book.
This book, I think, is mired in a lot of anger and you can feel it and it feels so righteous and good. You know, in reading it.
J: I must say I have apologized for the tone on many occasions.
K: I mean, I am here for it. But I was wondering what out of everything that's changed since the time that you were sort of inspired to write this book, what's the favorite thing of yours that's changed?
J: I have to say it's the army of practitioners out there doing the job competently without aversives thriving in their careers. It was not always so. It is still a war zone, philosophically for sure. There are these remaining kind of pockets of people who depend on shock and so on. They're going to go down fighting, but down they are going. This is 2024. It's not 1992 or in 96 when I wrote the book. It's not then anymore.
Z: Yeah, and I think that applies to the tone too, because it was needed, absolutely needed. And things have changed such a lot since then. And as you say, the shock trainers are going to go down fighting, but they are definitely people are going to have to stop using shock because we know so much more about the risks and so much more about the benefits as well of reward based training.
So I am going to ask you a question which is not on our list, but I want to know about your, your favorite thing. Because when you're training with rewards, the dog is really happy about doing it. So what's your favorite thing about using positive reinforcement to train a dog?
J: How the dog looks. You know, just the way they look when it's just like this. I mean, I can just do stuff and, and get, this is fun. This is like the best thing ever.
It's just how dogs look when you train with rewards versus how they look when you don't.
Z: Yeah. And I think that's so important because often when people are training with shock, they think the dog is being good and they don't seem to be able to read the dog's body language that shows that they are not happy at all in that happy expectant look on a dog's face. There was even a piece of research that looked at the look on the dog's face when they're taking part in positive reinforcement training. And it's just beautiful, I think.
J: Yeah.
Z: So I want to ask you a question about one of your other books because we're focusing on The Culture Clash today. But in addition to The Culture Clash, you've written quite a few other books that all of them are excellent. We've got Fight and Mine and we've got Dogs are from Neptune and we've also got Train Your Dog Like a Pro, which I mentioned in the introduction. So I want to ask you specifically about that because that's aimed at ordinary dog trainers. Why did you decide to write that particular book and who do you think will benefit most from it?
J: It's for guardians and it's for guardians who want to do it yourself. And for those people, there was already a lot of good kind of first principles information out there, but I didn't think that there was anything that was super duper granular and steady step by step.
And so that. And also that course that you mentioned from the great courses, Dog Training 101, they're designed to fill that gap of exactly what to do, put this into slot A and slot B, step by step, how to train in a modern and evidence based fashion.
Z: Thank you. And I have a question about your writing process as well. But I especially want to ask you about your writing process for Culture Clash because you've written all of these books, and Oh Behave is another one as well. But when you were writing Culture Clash, if we think about the tone of the book, did it all come out very easily or did you have to sit and plan it quite a lot? I know it was a long time ago, but what do you remember about the process of actually writing it?
J: I remember that I was very angry, that I was really very tired of sort of the ongoing narrative about dogs wanting to please us being promulgated by people who were, in my opinion, harming dogs. Egregiously harming dogs. And I couldn't, I couldn't stand it anymore. And so I kind of vomited it out in one summer. My process was not very good or professional. It just kind of out it came.
Now, over the years, I, you know, there's been a couple of rewrites to try and, you know, keep it up to date because my philosophy did change a little bit, and also to try and modulate that tone a little bit, because I know that it can be very often off putting.
Z: I don't know that it's off putting. I wouldn't say that. But I think it depends on who some people. And I'm sure it felt like it was needed at the time.
And there's a writing question that we often ask because we interface with a lot of different writers, Kristi and I. We have a writing group, and we also talk to a lot of different authors, and we always ask them for a writing tip.
J: I can't remember, a famous author, maybe it was Hemingway. Somebody said writing is rewriting.
So don't take what I just described when I wrote The Culture Clash. Don't do that, you know, for sure. Get out a draft. So the first draft is going to be rubbish, but then go back and revise, revise, show it to somebody, you know, and then revise it some more and then read it and then fix it and then be prepared to do multiple multiple drafts to get where you want to go.
K: I did want to, just because it occurred to me it's like a literary festival. This is essentially a literary festival. And I think talking about writing is so important because writing is a really important way that dog trainers interact with potential audiences. And I was wondering, like, are you just, like, a skilled word crafter or did you have classes on writing or how? Because you're a great author. You're a very readable author.
J: Thank you. Yeah, well, I appreciate that very much, but I, I don't. I don't consider myself in that echelon. I mean, there are people in that echelon. I am kind of, I'm a compulsive rewriter. So I have, over the years, become very much about honing things down and getting things tighter. So I do advise people to spend a good deal of their energy getting in there and very ruthlessly editing for length, editing for tightness, editing for clarity, getting feedback and then editing some more.
K: And did you have classes on, like, did you take creative writing or anything like that?
J: No, no, I didn't. I, you know, I might have. I mean, if I live long enough and retire, I might do something like that. I think those are probably great fun. I did not.
I think one thing that might have helped is I read a lot and I think reading helps a lot. Just sort of passively with the right, you know, ability to write, maybe.
Z: Yeah, yeah. And I think also it helps with understanding, like when we're talking about communicating with ordinary people about dog training. I think having all that, having done all of that reading helps you to explain things better.
And I absolutely will put you in that echelon of writers, by the way. I think you're a wonderful writer. So that's why we're so thrilled to have you, to have you here.
And I wanted to ask. You said one of your favorite things that has changed. And we talked about also how there are more people using positive reinforcement. And you said there are so many people doing this. And obviously The Culture Clash as a book has been one of those things that's been instrumental in causing change. And I refer to all the people who tell me that it's changed how they approach training dogs.
But we're part of a wider culture as well. So what other things do you think have helped to change the culture towards more people using reward based training methods?
J: That's a great question. I do think things like the MeToo movement, things like social media, which is, of course there are huge problems with social media, but the ability for people to sort of interact and get their own ideas out there.
And it just, I mean, society is different now. There's less tolerance of violence, there's less tolerance of oppression of groups. There's also, I think, less of a premium, what I would call speciesism, that we...
There's greater respect, I think, than ever before for being, for not being human. And I think all that is helping the cause.
Z: Yeah, I think definitely that is a change that. Do you think it's also to do with people being more likely to see dogs as part of their family?
J: Oh, certainly, yeah. And I think sometimes that was paid lip service previously, but it was so ingrained in the culture that what you did to your family member was, you know, scare the crap out of them or you know, or put a strangulation device around their neck.
Now I think we're. We're walking the walk a little bit more with the family member thing.
Z: Yeah, yeah. And we've seen changes in how people treat children, too. So do you think to some extent that kind of rubs off on how people interact with dogs as well?
J: I think that's a great point. Yes. I think it used to be, I mean, you know, previous generations where children, there was a greater tolerance for corporal punishment, greater tolerance for scaring the hell out of children.
I think that is no longer the case, and I don't think it's any shameful. I know there's still pockets of people who pour scorn on the idea of, you know, people having fur babies and so on and, you know, thinking of dogs as their kids. But I think that's a marvelous development. I think that's perfectly valid.
This partial transcript has been lightly edited for content and style.
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