Several years ago I wrote a short piece on social media about the way dog owners are often encouraged — particularly by trainers, and very often by behaviourists — to search for an underlying emotional cause behind problematic behaviour. The suggestion, more often than not, is that if a dog is doing something undesirable, dangerous, disruptive, or welfare-compromising, there must be some negative emotional driver sitting underneath it: fear, anxiety, insecurity, stress, trauma, discomfort — a concern-generating label.
And humans do love a label. We like things named, categorised, placed neatly into compartments, because once a behaviour has been given a label it feels as though it has already been partly understood. More than that, it allows the familiar response to be taken down from the shelf: this means that, therefore we do this. It creates a kind of behavioural uniformity that is comforting, because it suggests that once the category is identified, the route forward is already known.
And of course, that simplicity does something else as well: it lends weight to the person delivering it. From the point of view of a well-meaning dog owner, particularly one who is worried, inexperienced, or simply desperate for help, the professional who quickly identifies a category and then confidently applies the accepted response can appear highly knowledgeable, highly competent, and deeply experienced.
Part of that appearance of competence comes from the fact that the explanation itself is emotionally attractive. The dog is not framed as wilful, difficult, unruly, or insufficiently trained, but as carrying some internal burden — fear, anxiety, uncertainty, emotional conflict — something deserving of sympathy rather than scrutiny. And that immediately softens the whole picture for the owner, because it shifts the emotional weight away from questions of training, consistency, standards, or responsibility and places it instead upon an internal affliction within the dog itself.
In other words, the owner is not simply being offered an explanation for behaviour; they are often being offered relief. Relief that the dog is not doing what it is doing because clear boundaries have not been established, because behaviour has been rehearsed unchecked, or because intervention has come too late or too softly. Instead, the dog becomes the bearer of an emotional predicament, and that predicament naturally calls for a gentle response.
And once the cause has been framed in that way, the solution follows almost automatically: calmness, patience, distance, reassurance, food, avoidance of pressure, avoidance of conflict, avoidance of anything that may feel intrusive or uncomfortable. From beginning to end, the whole sequence is emotionally coherent. The diagnosis invites sympathy, and the treatment preserves it. It becomes, in effect, a kind of behavioural chicken soup — comforting to administer, comforting to receive, reassuringly benign in both language and method, and perhaps most appealing of all because there are no hard lumps in it. No awkward suggestion that the owner’s own actions, omissions, inconsistencies, delays, or misplaced sympathies may have helped shape what is now presenting itself as a behavioural problem. No uncomfortable chewing through questions about standards, boundaries, timing, or whether the dog has simply learned, over time, that certain behaviours work. Everything passes down easily, still warm enough to satisfy, still soft enough not to provoke too much self-examination. It satisfies because it nourishes belief while asking very little of the person holding the spoon!!
And that, perhaps, is why it is so readily embraced. It offers explanation without abrasion. It soothes while still sounding professional. It allows everybody involved to feel that something thoughtful and humane is being done, without first having to sit with the harder possibility that meaningful change may require a degree of honesty that is less comforting than the diagnosis itself.
It struck me then, and still strikes me now, that the emotional explanation offered is almost always negative. Rarely do we hear anybody ask whether the dog may simply find the behaviour itself intensely worthwhile. Rarely is the possibility raised that what sits underneath the behaviour may not be some form of distress at all, but instead, ‘positive’ emotional states – excitement, stimulation, fulfilment, or an activity the dog has learned to find deeply rewarding.
Why is that? Because negative explanations protect a particular way of thinking. They allow behaviour to be approached softly, sympathetically, and without too much confrontation. They preserve the comforting idea that if we are patient enough, gentle enough, understanding enough, the problem will eventually dissolve. Time, love and patience are the hallmark trinity of those who talk, but seldom walk.
But what if the dog is not distressed at all? What if it is exhilarated — highly stimulated, deeply engaged, biologically fulfilled by the very thing you are trying to stop? Chasing, attacking, biting, fighting, ignoring recall — what if the dog is doing it because it is good at it, because it enjoys it, because the behaviour itself is self-rewarding?
A simple example came up today during a Teams meeting with a rural stakeholder group. The discussion involved a dog repeatedly escaping its property, not by squeezing through fencing or finding a gap, but by learning to leap a cattle grid on the driveway. You don’t fence a cattle grid. A cattle grid is there to stop movement, yet this dog had worked out that if it committed itself properly, it could clear it and gain access to the field beyond — a field containing livestock. Repeatedly.
Now the important point is this: the dog was not leaping the cattle grid because it was afraid of the garden. It was not doing it because it felt emotionally distressed at home. It was doing it because something beyond that barrier had become worth getting to. The dog was not jumping away from something negative; it was jumping towards something it had already decided was worth the effort. The act itself had become learned, repeated, and deemed self-rewarding.
The dog, of course, has no moral concept of what its presence in that field may mean. It does not understand that a farmer seeing a loose dog among livestock may reasonably fear the worst. It does not understand risk, legal consequence, or even its own vulnerability. It simply knows that getting over that cattle grid leads to something it wants badly enough to keep repeating the effort.
And once you understand behaviour in those terms, you also understand why simply offering something pleasant elsewhere does not always solve it. A behaviour that is already paying for itself is often very difficult to compete with. As I have written elsewhere, many years ago, a Jack doesn’t trump an Ace. You cannot ‘out reward’ the better reward. Some behaviours only begin to change when doing them becomes difficult, unsuccessful, unpleasant, or no longer worth the effort.
That is exactly the point at which modern ideology starts to feel uncomfortable, because stopping behaviour rather than endlessly negotiating with it means accepting something many now prefer not to say aloud: punishment is not automatically a moral failure of training. In many serious cases, it is simply part of how behaviour is brought under meaningful control.
We simply need to look at our entire social structure to see this. To know this basic truth. And at this moment in time in particular, we can appreciate (even if we do not agree) that threatening behaviours are not met with appeasement, redirection or time, love and patience.
What has happened in dog training over recent years is that moral appearance has too often been confused with practical adequacy. The person who appears kindest frequently attracts the least criticism, even when the outcome for the dog remains poor, unstable, or temporary. Meanwhile, dogs continue rehearsing behaviours that are dangerous, destructive, or socially intolerable, while the explanation for that failure is endlessly softened rather than honestly confronted.
Why does that matter? Well, it matters because reality does not bend to sentiment, much as we may wish it did. Good intentions do not automatically produce good outcomes. And the growing number of dogs being chemically managed, chronically restricted, surrendered, or ultimately destroyed suggests that protecting human belief systems does not always protect dogs. In some cases, it simply delays the point at which somebody finally admits that what sounded nicest was never actually working.
If any of that resonates with you — if you are one of the hundreds of thousands of dog owners who have spent months, sometimes years, trying to bargain a dog out of behaviour that is dangerous, disruptive, or compromises safety — then get in touch. At Take the Lead, this is the kind of work we have specialised in for years: dealing honestly with difficult behaviour, dealing practically with it, and without pretending that serious problems disappear simply because the language around them has become softer.
