The main reason that people enroll in obedience training is not so much to train a dog to listen to commands such as sit, down, stay, etc., although this is the desired outcome, but to develop in the dog's mind the order of the human pack he, or she, resides in. In other words, to establish our position as the "Pack Leader".

At Canine Leaders, we help people change their behavior so that they can influence their dog in a better way. We educate our clients on dog behavior - we try to get them to understand how a dog thinks so that they can work with that, rather than trying to change the dog to think and act more like a human.

If a dog is trained out of fear with just harsh and compulsive corrections, you will have a dog that listens to your commands, but only out of fear of you. By using these training techniques alone, you’ll find yourself with a dog that will listen to your commands, but he may not necessarily respect you. This compulsive style of training is ineffective in many ways. That being said, I am not against using negative reinforcement when it is needed. 

On the contrary, if a dog is trained by all positive alone, he will also learn to obey your commands, but he will not learn to respect you because you have not established yourself as the leader of the pack. This style of training (when used by itself) is in-effective, as well. Don’t get me wrong, I use treats and toys during training too, but I also use distraction and correction.

By using a BALANCED technique of positive and negative reinforcement, a dog will learn to respect you as a leader and will in turn naturally obey your command out of respect, NOT because you have a treat in your hand, or because he fears you. Also, dogs with behavior problems will understand right from wrong and make a conscious choice to disregard unwanted behavior such as aggression. The positive trainer would have an aggressive dog put down because their technique does not directly address this issue. Their method ignores it - praise the good and ignore the bad. Well how do you ignore an aggressive dog, or a large dog that jumps on people, and pretty well any other behavior related issue? You can’t! 

We use a very well-balanced technique and we are not afraid to go one way, or the other, depending on the particular dog that we are dealing with. In other words, we are not afraid to use more treat in some circumstances, and we are most certainly not afraid to correct a negative behavior when it occurs.