I wish more people saw it this way. My family calls me 'the dog whisperer' because I've always had a good touch with dogs. It's nothing special really, just tha

I wish more people saw it this way. My family calls me 'the dog whisperer' because I've always had a good touch with dogs. It's nothing special really, just that I treat training like a fun mutual game. It's like a puzzle. You just have to figure out the exact set of incentives and conditions to establish a behavior and then to generalize it. You have to teach yourself how to teach the dog. And every dog is different, so you have to be good at modeling their mental state and identifying their needs, which is a huge part of what you need to teach yourself. For example, my dog can be insanely annoying because he has tons of energy and begs for play constantly. His old owners couldn't deal with it anymore so I adopted him. A longish 1.5 mile walk every day plus a brief game of fetch and he's totally fine. Plus consistent lack of response to his begging. All it took to solve his behavior problem was understanding his emotions and strategizing to manage them. He was anxious because he had too much energy. Burn off some of that and stop rewarding the bad behavior, then he's fine. It's been three months and he's already a far happier, better behaved dog. My point being that this problem solving approach requires the owner to want to 'learn' the dog every bit as much as they want the dog to learn behaviors. Otherwise you'll demand the dog behave a certain way and get frustrated when it doesn't. Then you take the frustration out on the dog, or the dog senses it and gets anxious because it can't figure out what it did wrong. This leads to a downward spiral of misbehavior and escalating but ineffective negative reinforcement. Even good trainers get frustrated but loving the mutual problem solving activity in and of itself and loving the dog for its own sake go a long way toward reducing trainer frustration and its impact on the dog.