Friday, April 12, 2019

Are You An Old-school Dog Trainer?


Folks have been arguing about dog training forever!

Consider this: In that classic of antiquity, "Roman Farm Management: The Treatises of Cato and Varro" we find Marcus Terentius Varro's observation that sheep dogs are often loyal to shepherds *despite* the fact that few shepherds of the era (50 A.D.) were bothering to follow the sage advice of Hostilius Saserna, given in 49 B.C.:

"Whoever wishes to be followed by a dog should throw him a cooked frog."

Click and treat ... or not?

2 comments:

  1. Edze5:41 AM

    So, Marcus pointed out cooked frogs are not the only things that motivates dogs. No coincidence it was herders he observed, he would have had a similar experience if it had been hunters.

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  2. tuffy1:23 AM

    to be more accurate, sheepdogs like border collies love work; they know the shepherds are the source for work--signals, commands and such. they stick around the shepherds for that, not because of that 'love' that people like to attribute them having; this is especially true in a dog working for a good sheep dog trainer that knows this about the dogs. and they didn't use frogs or other such treats to train, you can be sure of that.

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