Three Forms of Dog Training

Lee Charles Kelley is still going at it with his latest blog post, Three Forms of Dog Training.

Most people think there are only two types of training for pet dogs, dominance training and positive reinforcement. But there is actually a third form called drive training, which is far more effective than the other two.

In the current dog training marketplace drive training is the least understood and the least used with pet dogs, and yet it’s the most effective of the three. Plus it’s the method most often used to train working dogs: drug and bomb detection dogs, search-and-rescue dogs, military dogs, and police dogs.

So what is drive training, exactly, how does it work, and why isn’t it being more widely used for training pet dogs?

Before we get into that, let’s take a look at how all three methods evolved.

[read on...]

Then, in 1992 a new form of drive training was developed based on the laws of physics rather than the unscientific concepts of dominance or the somewhat semi-science of operant conditioning. This new method was created by former police and drug-enforcement dog trainer Kevin Behan.* His model—which he called Natural Dog Training—was based on the principles of flow and thermodynamics (among other things). In other words, it was based on physics.

[hmm...]