Free advice is the most expensive kind

There is more free dog training advice available now than at any point in history and dogs are not getting easier to live with.

That is worth sitting with, because the obvious explanation, that the advice is bad, is mostly not true. Plenty of it is good. The problem is what gets stripped off it on the way to you.

Advice is an answer to a question you did not hear

A trainer says do not let the dog on the sofa. That advice came from a specific case. A dog with a guarding history, a household with small children, a particular layout. Under those conditions it was correct.

It arrives at you as a rule. You have a nine month old labrador with no guarding history and the rule now costs you a comfortable evening for no benefit.

Another trainer says never use food, it makes the dog dependent. Also came from somewhere real, probably a working context with a specific dog. Arrives as doctrine.

Everything you read was true for someone. The conditions that made it true were left behind, and the conditions are the part that mattered.

The compounding cost

You try the first thing for ten days. It does not work, or you cannot tell, so you try the second thing. That contradicts the first, so the dog now has two competing pictures. Then a third thing arrives from a video.

Three months later the dog has no clear rules about anything and the owner concludes that nothing works with this dog.

What actually happened is that four reasonable approaches were each run for a fortnight, which is not long enough for any of them, and the inconsistency was the only thing the dog learned reliably.

What free advice cannot do

It cannot see your dog. It cannot tell you whether the dog not coming back is fear, frustration, arousal, or a learned sequence, and those four need opposite responses.

It cannot tell you what to stop doing, which is usually where the leverage is.

And it has no way of knowing which of the six things you changed at once was the one that worked, so you cannot repeat it.

How to use free information well

Take one thing. Run it for four weeks without adding anything else. Write down what you saw in the first week so that you can compare honestly instead of from memory.

Four weeks and one variable will teach you more than six months of collecting approaches.

And read the conditions, not the instruction. When someone tells you what to do, the useful question is what had to be true for that to be the right answer, and whether it is true here.

Why I give things away anyway

Everything on this site is free and it stays free. The six checks are free. Every one of these pieces is free. You can email me a question and I will answer it and there is no charge and no call.

That is not generosity, it is a filter. If you can read the material and sort your own dog out, good, and I would rather that than take money for something you did not need.

What I sell is the part information cannot do. Looking at your actual dog, and telling you which of the four things it is.

Information is cheap and it is nearly free everywhere. Knowing which piece of it applies to the animal in front of you is the whole job, and that has never been free anywhere.