Ausshole Academy

 BOOK REVIEW

A while back, I purchased a book, that has by far became my absolute favorite of all my library.  

THE CULTURE CLASH- A revolutionary new way of understanding the relationship between humans and domestic dogs.  By Jean Donaldson.  

This book is amazing and I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in dogs, trains dogs, or just wishes to learn more about dogs.  

Here is my favorite of all time quotes from this book.

"So what is the fallout for dogs of the Walt Disney myth?  As soon as you bestow intelligence and morality, you bestow the responsibility that goes along with them.  In other words, if the dog knows it wrong to destroy furniture yet deliberately and maliciously does it, remembers the wrong he did and feels guilt, it feels like he merits a punishment, doesn't it?  Well, that's just what dogs have been getting- a lot of punishment.  We set them up for all kinds of punishment by overestimating their ability to think.  Increasingly, it's the so-called "cold" behaviorist model that ends up giving dogs a much better crack at meeting the demands we make of them.  The fuzzy wuzzy model, gives dogs problems that they cannot solve and then punishes them for failing."

In other words stop treating a dog as if it were human, they are not.  They are a completely different species, and we should treat them as such.  

This book goes into a lot psychology of dogs, but it also has a lot of interesting training methods.  

Again it is the book I recommend first and foremost to anyone who owns a dog, who is thinking of getting a dog, and anyone who trains dogs.