The sprightly Japanese organizing guru Marie Kondo has gained worldwide acclaim for essentially being an excellent trainer of humans. Specifically, she trains people to "tidy up" their homes. While she might be adept at using positive reinforcement (mostly in the form of her sheer enthusiasm about junk drawers) and other methods that dovetail with Good Dog Training, her approach also  encourages people to attach their actions to part in certain bizarre "superstitious" behaviors. like verbally "thanking" pieces of clothing and "waking up" sleeping books by tapping them. In this episode, Annie, who believes that  behavior-changing techniques should appeal more to common sense than to magical thinking,  talks about how Kondo and famous dog trainers like Barbara Woodhouse and Cesar Millan douse snake oil over their proposed solutions in order to suggest that clutter is caused by sleeping books,  dogs love the letter T, and nice leash walking can only happen if you channel amorphous invisible powers. 

Notes: 

Marie Kondo on Netflix - Marie Kondo's book: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up - Marie Kondo on The Late Show w/ Stephen Colbert, 2/5/2019 - Marie Kondo on Jimmy Kimmel Live, 1/29/2019 - Cesar Millan clip quoted in podcast, in which Millan tells the dog owner that her dog's won't listen to her unless she is "calm and assertive" and "injecting energy" into them while walking. - Barbara Woodhouse, dog trainer who throws books at dogs.  Clip in podcast is taken from here - On doing dishes and peeing 

The following are blog posts about The Dog Training Triad. Each post contains the podcast episodes on the same subjects, which were I posted last July  (Episodes 16, 17 and 18)

Part 1: Management 

Part 2: Rewards

Part 3: Timing

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Partial Transcript:

[Intro]



Annie:

Hey there, humans. So today I want to talk about someone who has been making the rounds on talk shows, and just generally in the news a lot, her name is Marie Kondo. And if you live under a rock and you don't know who I'm talking about, she is an expert on tidying up. In fact, her new Netflix series is called "Tidying Up" but years before this Netflix show, she was already quite well known for her book, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Now, I know you're listening to this and you're saying to yourself, hold on, this is a dog training podcast. Why are we talking about this young Asian woman who helps people clean out their closets?  Well, it actually has to do with superstition or what dog trainers call superstitious behaviors.



Now you might be surprised that dogs are superstitious as are people, of course.  And I'll talk a little bit more in a minute about what dog superstition looks like. I think you probably already know about human superstitions, like wearing a certain pair of socks so that your favorite baseball team wins or not walking under a ladder or crossing a black cat...



Full Transcript available at SchoolfortheDogs.com/Podcasts

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