Mountain is curled up in her bed next to me. There are a couple of scars running down her nose from a few fox encounters in her youth, and if you look carefully, you can see the very tip of her nose is cut off from a groundhog bite. A front canine is broken -- a little something to remember from a sette with double raccoons. Mountain works a little differently now -- she will stand back and bay a little more. Now she knows butt from breath. Old dogs know more than young ones do.
And yet this dog wakes up every morning to check what pants and shoes I am wearing. She lives for Carrharts and boots.
My point here is that this dog has not "bellied over" from a few natural aversives, and neither have any other dogs that I have owned. She has not been too cowed by bites, barb wire and brambles.
For that matter, neither are the cows who seem to be very happy living behind their electric fence. They are not too traumatized by having been nipped by the wire a few times in their life.
All of this is a wind-up to a truly excellent piece from Ruth Crisler about real world aversives and the fomented fear and contrived crisis fanned by certain dog trainers who seek to browbeat the world into thinking there is only one way to train a dog. Read the whole thing.
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