The 100 Silliest Things People Say About Dogs

Those who favor the positive dog training methods such as clicker are also usually familier with the work by Karen Pryor and her followers, so they have a certain idea why they want to train their dogs the way they do. They also know that these positive methods work not only for teaching tricks, but also for working on everyday situations in which we'd like our dogs to behave other than they behave, for example not pulling on the leash, not barking excessively etc. If they've really delved into the subject, they know also that positive methods have been successfully used to help cases of aggressiveness. And they certainly approve of these non-violent methods as opposed to the choke collars, shock collars, water throwing, kicking, Alpha-Rolls of other so-called experts.

But what are the scientific reasons for the successes of positive training? Is positive training better than the TV methods of some quick-fix alpha professors? What does "Alpha" mean? What is a dominant dog? What role do the wolf and wolf packs play in training our dogs? What are the scientific proofs of which methods?

The interesting thing about this book is that the author takes the most common things said about dogs and gives the researched reasons why these things are silly. She gives source material for just about all of her explanations.
This book is however NOT a training manual. It give very few concrete suggestions as to what to do, but it sure gives exceptional examples as to why what people have done as a result of the violent-type trainers' methods are not only (potentially) short-term at best or even counter-productive, but can even be dangerous to dog and dog-owner.

The book has forced me, as a cross-over owner (one who raised previous dogs with the rolled-newspaper method to "mostly" positive to now simply positive) rethink even my present methods, question my own "knowledge" and as result forced me to delve even deeper into some of the source material she quoted or paraphrased from or used to support her findings.