September 10, 2021

The mainstream media is confused about dog training: Two journalists-turned-trainers discuss a misguided WSJ op-ed & more (featuring Kiki Yablon)

54 minutes

Last month, the Wall Street Journal ran an opinion piece about how positive-reinforcement dog training is too much trouble, concluding that punishment-based training is faster and, overall, underrated. Quite a few dog trainers wrote to the Wall Street Journal, angry that such a major publication would run something with such spurious facts and no sources. Annie called up her long time friend Kiki Yablon to talk about why so much "journalism" about dog training goes wrong. Kiki, who is a Karen Pryor Academy faculty member and trains dogs in Chicago, was an editor for many years, and turned to a career in dog training around the same time as Annie quit the field of journalism as well. In this casual chat, the two discuss the errors reporters frequently make when writing about dogs, the traditional media's dismissiveness of pets as a serious subject, the general public's misunderstandings about behavior as a science, and the flubs they both made themselves when attempting to write about dog training before they set out to become trainers.

Learn more about Kiki at https://kikiyablondogtraining.com/

Learn more about my cousin Dinah Grossman's pie shop in Chicago at https://www.spinningj.com/

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Notes:

I’m Disciplining My Dog, Not Torturing Her, Wall Street Journal 8/2/21

https://www.wsj.com/articles/dog-training-barking-puppy-ecollar-prong-collar-11627919661

Letters to the editor about the article

https://www.wsj.com/articles/peta-train-your-dog-humane-shock-prong-collar-crating-11628546838?cx_testId=3&cx_testVariant=cx_4&cx_artPos=0&mod=WTRN#cxrecs_s

More about Laura Monaco Torelli

https://www.lauramonacotorelli.com/

Roald Dahl's The Sound Machine (1949)

https://fleurmach.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/rdahl_screamingtrees.pdf

Annie's 2007 article about people becoming dog trainers

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/27/fashion/27DOGS.html

Chicago Reader article Kiki edited about pitbulls

https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/born-bad/

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Partial Transcript:

Kiki Yablon:

There’s this Roald Dahl story that ran in The New Yorker that I think about all the time. And basically it’s a man who invents a box that makes sounds audible to him that other people can’t hear. And then he takes it out in the garden and the neighbor is pruning her roses and all he can hear are screams. That’s the level I think that we all get to when we’re working with animals and their people, and you see all these little moments of misery. Or like sometimes I wake up thinking about, God, dogs have to ask every time they need to go to the bathroom for their entire life. Like…!

Full Transcript at SchoolfortheDogs.com/Podcast

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