Harsh as she may come across on her Animal Planet program "It's Me or the Dog," where she casts herself as the stern disciplinarian, whipping misguided dog owners into shape and dressing the part with black leather and tall boots, Victoria Stilwell's dog-training methods are anything but harsh.
"It's a methodology that's taken dog training from being in a place where it's concentrated on human dominance and animal submission," the British dog trainer explains. "It's very much based on the behavior principals that we use for teaching children, based on the latest behavioral science, a methodology that is based on positive reinforcement and rewards. We're trying to show dog owners there's a better way to train their dogs."
The downside? Stilwell's methodology isn't always as fast as the punishment-based paradigm that America has historically favored. The upside? It's safer.
"We know now that traditional training methods can actually damage the human/animal bond, and in some cases they can even be dangerous," Stilwell explains. "We call it quick fix training. But quick fixes very quickly become unstuck.
"Let's just take a very common behavior problem: fear aggression," she continues. "You've got a dog that's being fearful and it looks like it's being nasty. The old methodology would say to hold that dog down until the animal is submitted, to use your hand to simulate a bite with the dog. Some people kick or scream to get their dog to stop. Well, that might make the dogstop doing it for a time, but it's going to do it again in the future. What you're doing is you're suppressing reaction to emotion. You're telling the dog, 'You feel scared but you're not allowed to.' So the dog learns not to show its emotion … so instead of growling to make a dog he's afraid of go away, the dog will go straight to biting. The dog still feels afraid; he becomes a ticking time bomb."
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Stilwell's preferred method involves defusing the dog's anxiety and de-conditioning the dog until a situation is no longer scary for him.
"It takes time," Stilwell admits. "You can't take a person that's suffering anxiety, send him to a psychologist, and make him feel fine in one day."
Implicit in Stilwell's description of her methods is a denunciation of those of Cesar Millan, the country's most visible dog trainer, whom she minimizes direct references to for reasons of both legality and etiquette-it wouldn't be prudent for her to potentially slander a fellow television host by calling his methods reckless (especially when plenty of animal organizations have already made that case for her).
"In his way he's a very charismatic person," she does say of Millan. "He loves dogs very much, and he's doing what he knows how to do. He's spreading the message of responsible dog ownership, but his methods are old school." Elsewhere in the conversation, though, she adds, "you can't go into a house in one day and deal with a very aggressive dog, then beat the dog into submission and say that it's a massive success."
The bottom line, she asks, is "Do you want your dog to follow you because it wants to, or because it fears what will happen if it doesn't?"
Victoria Stilwell speaks about her methods and illustrates them using local shelter dogs at a 7:30 p.m. appearance at the Pabst Theater on Tuesday, May 12, which will also include a Q&A session.