Here is a shocker for you: dog training is a rather polarized activity. It is common for everyone to retreat to their respective camps, defensive, backs up, lips curled back with their teeth showing. In my opinion, this is the wrong way to go about things. Do I have preferences on how I will train my dog and my client's dogs? Yes. Are there certain techniques and tools I simply will not use in my training program? Yes. Does that mean the people who use those techniques or tools are inherently evil and incapable of having any value in their overall knowledge about dogs or dog training? No.

In this podcast we will discuss how, as your dog's advocate, you owe it to them to always have an open mind, so you will be able to pick out the diamonds among the poop piles.

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Want to learn more about Dog Sport University? Check out our website and look over our Dog Sport Online Courses. You may also be interested in our informative webinars as well as the Dog Sport University blog. 

Have you heard about Scent Work and want to delve deeper into that activity? Perfect, we have just the thing! Check out our sister online dog training platform, Scent Work University where you will find courses and webinars suited for both those dog owners who simply want to have fun, and those who are seriously competing with their dogs.

Maybe you're looking to help your puppy or dog in the manners department. Then your need to check out Family Dog University where we provide a variety of programs to help your dog be the best canine family companion they can be!

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to the All About Dog Training and Dog Sports Podcast. In this podcast, we'll be talking about all things dog training. We'll also be giving you a behind the scenes look as far as what your instructor may be going through, a variety of dog training tips, how you can succeed in various dog sports, and much more. In this episode, we'll be talking about finding diamonds in poop piles. Now, I don't mean this literally, but rather we'll be discussing how it is that we can go about approaching dog training in a way that we are not discounting valuable information, and that valuable information could actually be hiding in some pretty obscure places. Before we get started in the podcast, let me just do a very quick introduction for myself.

My name is Dianna Santos. I'm the owner and lead instructor for Dog Sport University. Dog Sport University is an online dog training platform where we cover everything from good manners training to helping you succeed within a variety of dog sports. We provide online courses, webinars, and seminars. So, we urge you to check that out if you do have any dog training needs. But without any further ado, let's get started in the podcast.

The whole purpose behind this podcast episode is to talk about finding diamonds in poop piles, and no, I don't want you running out and actually going through all of your dog's poop piles to see whether or not there's a diamond in there and you could retire. This is a metaphor. So, the one thing that I'm hoping that we can achieve with this podcast is an understanding that knowledge is knowledge. It can always help us regardless of where it may have come from. One of the themes that I'm noticing within the dog training community as a whole is that we can be very cliquey and we can also blind ourselves to potentially good information simply because of who is saying that information.

So, there's a couple of topics within this general idea that I'd like to cover. The first is the fact that it would be helpful for anyone involved in dog training, whether they be handler, a dog owner, a competitor, or an instructor, or a trainer, to just be open-minded, and that someone may have a completely different approach to training than you do, but they may also have something valuable within their bag of tricks that will be valuable for both you and your dog. It could even just simply be looking at things throug