Duane, you write most people that criticise such clips or movies have zero experience with the movie industry. Here I have to agree fully. I am one of them. But I know that in that industrie mostly all is a about making money. This would be ok for me but only to certain point. But if this makes them think to have the right to treat the animal like this? They don't respect the animals needs, in other words they don't respect the animal. It is just an object to be used for their interesses. (I guess of course not all are like this.)

If we begin to justify such a behavior in the movie industry the jump to justify some day the behavior of those who use dogs for fights is not very far. And the excuse for doing this is again: Money. Don't get me wrong. With saying that I do NOT compare the trainer of the clip with them. Dog fights are without doubt incredibly more brutal and really damnable. But the inacceptable motivation, Money, which makes certain people believe they can allow themselves lots of nasty things with an animal is the same.

Ecollars: I have not used one yet. But I'm preparing myselfs for it for certain situations. I have Ed Frawley's DVD about this and he is completely against avoidance training. I will allso buy the 2 Michael Ellis DVDs and decide after having studied them, if I will use an ecollar or not. The way Ed represents it, it is not force at all. He gives low level stims (level adapted to the reaction of the individual dog) and even this not often. He says it is more human to give a CORRECT e-stim in the CORRECT moment than 100 jerks to correct a dog.

Or are you also against corrections in general? I think there are situations where a correction is needed, but again: only if done in the way we learn it from professionals.

I know that some trainers still use avoidance training, probably because it is the quicker way to have success. But certainly not Ed, nor Michael Although I haven't got yet Michael's DVD's about it, I have watched a lot of other DVDs from him, where he mentions that method. He clearly is against it.

You say when training a dog for work we often have to react within limited time. What exactly do you mean by this? Do you mean giving our markers etc. with the exact timing? This would be something else than we're speaking about. Or a correction? Also needs exact timing.

But for a dog who is still in the learning phase, I'd never give a physical correction. I'd lleave him the time he needs for learning whatever it might be. I'd never put him in any way under pressure if doesn't learn it within the time time frame I hoped he would do it.

Tammy, thanks for the links. If that clip was edited, manipulated in order to mislead people, it is a big mess without doubt. It was a fake. Absolutely irresponsible. This then is another reason for indignation.

But even if it was a fake, some facts remain, no matter when this dog was treated like that "American Humane says the investigation confirmed preliminary findings that the two scenes shown in the edited video were filmed at different times.

Makes things worse. So the dog had to go through panic twice.
The dog was clearly under stress. It doesn't reduce my indignation even a bit that it happened not on the same occasion. I cannot see what is better about that. It has been done with that poor dog, that's what counts.

"The first scene was stopped after the dog showed signs of stress." !!!! It wasn't. stopped. The trainer threw the dog into the water. Or are dogs actors who can just pretend to be in panic?

"It says the dog was not forced to swim in the water at any time." ????????? So I must be blind.

"During the last scene, handlers immediately assisted the dog out of the water,."
And he wasn't harmed?! Clapping hands! I imagine he has not been physically harmed. There exist other forms of harming a dog.

There should have at least been a trainer already in the water to help him immediately, when he saw, he was sinking into vertical position, grab him and help him out, before his head got under water.

"Handlers immediately assisted the dog out of the water." Immediately is good! It took them quite a lot of time to get the struggling dog out, much too long for a dog in panic."

Well, we seem to have different convictions about all that. I can live with this and it doesn't change my estimation for Duane and Tammy. But what happened with that dog really happened, when even in an other way than I knew. I cannot be of your opinion, it would be hypocritical to agree.

Michael Ellis on Escape/ avoidance training: https://leerburg.com/flix/player.php/217/Michael_Ellis_on_Escape_Avoidance_Training

I think that Christina may be confused as to what escape / avoidance training is. Escape/ avoidance training does not have to involve pain.

Escape training is where the dog learns to turn the pressure off: When Michael calls the dog in a recall, he will turn the e-collar on low stim on constant. Once the dog commits to the recall, he turns the stim off. The dog learns that by complying with the command he can turn the pressure off.
We do this as well with puppies that are learning to walk on a lead. When the puppy pulls, we stop our movement and hold the leash taunt. Once the puppy stops pulling, we let the leash go loose - teaching the puppy that by stopping the pulling, she can stop the pressure on the leash.

Avoidance- the dog complies with the command to avoid an aversive/ correction. The correction can be a minor tug on the prong collar, low level stim from an ecollar, etc. It does not have to cause pain. The puppy does not pull on the leash anymore because it does not like the pressure on her throat from a tight leash.

Just wanted to clear that up a bit...

 Quote: Kelly

Michael Ellis on Escape/ avoidance training: https://leerburg.com/flix/player.php/217/Michael_Ellis_on_Escape_Avoidance_Training

I think that Christina may be confused as to what escape / avoidance training is. Escape/ avoidance training does not have to involve pain.

Escape training is where the dog learns to turn the pressure off: When Michael calls the dog in a recall, he will turn the e-collar on low stim on constant. Once the dog commits to the recall, he turns the stim off. The dog learns that by complying with the command he can turn the pressure off.
We do this as well with puppies that are learning to walk on a lead. When the puppy pulls, we stop our movement and hold the leash taunt. Once the puppy stops pulling, we let the leash go loose - teaching the puppy that by stopping the pulling, she can stop the pressure on the leash.

Avoidance- the dog complies with the command to avoid an aversive/ correction. The correction can be a minor tug on the prong collar, low level stim from an ecollar, etc. It does not have to cause pain. The puppy does not pull on the leash anymore because it does not like the pressure on her throat from a tight leash.

Just wanted to clear that up a bit...

Thank you, Kel

And I must still Agree with our friend CHRISTINA about her General Points on this thread...

A) GRANTED that the Video in Question was edited & manipulated, which is BAD.

B) GRANTED that the dog Entered the water "Voluntarily" both before & after.

C) IMHO, what Christina Objects to is the seeming K9 mishandling in THIS clip.

D) GRANTED none of us was THERE, but we can all SEE that clip.

E) NO amount of $$$ would induce most of us to Mishandle Our dog like THAT...

F) I find any Argument Offensive based on, "But the wrangler needs his JOB"

If the above is NOT the gist of Christina's points here, then she will correct me.

 Quote: Christina Stockinger

You say when training a dog for work we often have to react within limited time. What exactly do you mean by this? Do you mean giving our markers etc. with the exact timing? This would be something else than we're speaking about. Or a correction? Also needs exact timing.

No, that is not what I mean. What I mean is, in the working dog world, you get calls to provide a dog that will perform a task that the dog may have to learn very quickly. In other words, say you get a call for a bulldog to crawl under a fence on a tv set next Monday, and you have not trained any of your bulldogs to crawl. You have to figure out a way to either train the dog in a few days or a way to get the dog to do something that will fool the camera into thinking the dog crawled under the fence. You have a deadline and a goal that you must meet, and failure means you lose the job.

Now, let me take that example a step farther. Say you manage to train that dog to do that over the weekend. He is so good, as a matter of fact, that you have a chance to proof the behavior in several locations. You get to the movie set on Monday, and instead of a wooden fence that you know your dog has crawled under many times, there is a chainlink fence. The dog doesn't like the way it looks, so he refuses to perform. You know your dog, and you know he will be okay once he sees that it is no big deal. If you walk away, you lose the job.

The same thing can happen in any line of work. You may have a company that provides sniffing dogs for security work. You might get a request for a new odor or a strange venue. There are going to be times, when training working dogs, when you have to decide how much pressure you can put on your dog to perform a new task.

 Quote: Christina Stockinger

I know that some trainers still use avoidance training, probably because it is the quicker way to have success. But certainly not Ed, nor Michael Although I haven't got yet Michael's DVD's about it, I have watched a lot of other DVDs from him, where he mentions that method. He clearly is against it.

You need to watch the clip that Kelly linked. Most of us here are familiar with ME and his methodology for years, so arguing it is pointless. He even points out that the use of pressure is forcing the dog to perform until the dog gets conditioned to the command, that some dogs require less pressure than others, and that some dogs respond and recover from pressure more easily.

That is an older video in which Ed stated that he never uses the ecollar for avoidance training. Ed's methods changed after he began partnering with ME, and he accepts how ME uses pressure.

 Quote: Kelly

I'm just saying that you need to consider the source - the truth is probably somewhere between the two stories.

AND, I've had worse battles with Drift over trimming her nails or cleaning her ears or getting on the exam table at the vet, and she is perfectly fine.

I am willing to bet that if someone randomly took video of anyone struggling with a dog - like over a nail trim - they can spin it to make it look like abuse. It's not hard to edit something to make it look bad - especially with a Shepherd - all they have to do is lower their ears and they look like they've been abused their whole lives...

Keep everything in perspective - let's not be Lemmings...

Kelly

Christina, I posted those links as a follow up to Kelly's post. I did not post my "convictions." I had never heard of the movie prior to the video surfacing, Nor is it a movie I would ever have any interest in.

I do agree with Kelly's post above. I don't have enough of the facts to have an opinion.

Thanks a lot to you all; I think I understand you all better now. I will answer probably a few days later and first watch the links which you sent. I will also go to rewatch what I already saw, maybe I've misunderstood some things.

I'm quite in a hurry at the moment because my husband fell from a shaky (!) ladder yesterday evening and has broken an ankle of his leg. (I swear he wasn't thrown!)

Just one thing about ME's and Ed's opinion: Even if they use avoidance training, but do you look at pressure - adapted thoroughly to the individual dog - also as force? For me this is not the same. Using the right level of pressure in order to teach the dog within the in certain cases desired time frame and in case someone doesn't reach this goal, would you then use force like throwing a dog into the water or some other form of force? I cannot not imagine this from anyone of you.

And if he really wasn't thrown into the water, but it is shown like that on the clip - how is it possible to fake something like this? Sorry, this simplly doesn't go into my head,

Christina, I'm sorry to hear about your husband's accident. I hope his injury isn't too serious and he'll be back on his feet soon.

 Quote: Christina Stockinger

And if he really wasn't thrown into the water, but it is shown like that on the clip - how is it possible to fake something like this? Sorry, this simplly doesn't go into my head,

Just to address the quote above, I take issue with the terms "fake" or "faked" or "fake news" being used to describe the clips we are all discussing on this thread. I don't believe anyone is suggesting that the dog did not go into the water at the hands of the trainer, as depicted in these clips. What did happen is that these are a couple of very short clips from the day's filming, edited in such a way to show only the couple of moments where it might appear that the dog is in distress. When these edited clips became public, groups like PETA piled on and called it animal abuse.

As Kelly and others have mentioned earlier, any dog is capable of looking distressed when having to submit to something it does not particularly want to do. Veterinary and grooming procedures are just a couple of obvious examples.

In these days of photo-shopping and air-brushing and CGI and special effects, it is possible to make photos or videos appear realistic when they are not. In fact, there is another video related to this movie being circulated by animal rights groups that shows a German Shepherd jumping into a rushing wall of water, as purported proof of animal abuse, and that IS a CGI dog! But I really don't think anyone is saying the video that is the subject of this thread was "faked," meaning it never happened or that wasn't a real dog or whatever. The gist of the discussion here and elsewhere on the Internet is simply about whether people believe these clips depict animal abuse, not whether they are "real" or "fake."

thanks, cheri. His injury doesn't seem to be very serious until now. but he needs to wear a plaster for about 4 weeks and will have to move limping. Part of body awareness training perhaps? Or hopefully even a self induced avoidance training? But as we lack the consistant repetition I doubt it. Thanks for your compassion. More about everything - later.

Hi Kelly. About avoidance/escape training. Thanks for the link. I think I have expressed myself inexactly. I meant that neither Michael nor Ed use it while a dog still is unfamilar with a certain skill. M.E. says we have to divorce the process of learning and correction, no matter whether we use leash corrections or ecollar stims.

We shouldn't ever give a correction as long as were not absolutely sure, the dog knows perfectly what is expected from him.

So my error is probably to have spoken about excluding avoidance/escape out of training instead of saying out of the teaching phase of a behavior, which is not yet solid.

The same principle he communicates in his DVD about leash pressure (have not yet had the time to rewatch all the other ones), which matches with the DVD you mentioned, Before he uses leash pressure or ecollar stims he gets the dog first gradually used to those techniques .

Ex. A soon as he feels any tension on the leash he backs up with very exact timing, but never with stressing the dog in that way like on that clip, He says a dog needs to get habituated to a certain amount af stress, as during his whole life he will experience stressy situations. In this sense and also for training purposes he then also uses it thoroughly within sessions for varios behaviors. In order to block incorrection within an exercise, E.g. heeling: he will help him with leash pressure into the right position and so hinder him to make the same errors again and again, for like this dog easily might adopt bad habits. But M.E. always does this in a thoroughly calculated way. E.g: For teaching a dog staying on his bed he also helps with leash pressure but always combined with his reward based training, so it becomes more reinforcing and not stressy any more.

Working with such methods involving sometimes slight stress is for me not the same as to disrespect a great fear.

You're also comparing with skimming nails, grooming and things like that, which simply have to be. Good comparison. But don't you think we should prepare the dog for this at home using marker/rew. training instead of confronting the dog with this without any habituation with such procedures? In the course of Mark Keating (Relationship Games) this is shown very clearly.

Of course, I must admit, that there may be dogs whom despite of preparation will react very fearfully, probably especially the first few times, because they are in a very unfamilar surrounding. I have only experience with my dogs and cannot judge how it is with others.

But such types of a certain inevitable force are for me a completely different treatmennt than the one on that clip.

BTW: Highly interesting also the part of that study, where most of those tested dogs released more cortisol, when they recieved negative punishment than when a ecollar stim.
Means, withdrawal of reward will "annoy" the dog much more. Well I don't know this study enough, I guess the reaction will depend a lot on the level of the stim, the reward the dog expected, the temperament of the individual dog and other things probably too.