Prevention Beats Extinction: Smarter Dog Training with Don Hanson

Kirsten has a way of describing how modern dog training grew up, and it comes in three phases. First the scientific one, when the Brelands' and Baileys' work came through the chicken workshops and the field found out there was a science underneath it. Then the professional one, when it turned out that loving animals is not a business plan. And now the ethical one. Don Hanson has lived all three of them, and because he is a prolific writer, he wrote them down while they were happening. Thirty years of this field's history exists in his archive whether the field asked for it or not.

Don met Bob at his first APDT conference in Valley Forge, signed up for a week in Arkansas before he left the building, and went back the following year for the intermediate course. He joins Kirsten Kraljevic and Dr. Bob Bailey to talk about what actually changed and what stubbornly has not. Along the way: the Orlando conference where sixty-odd famous dog trainers chased chickens up and down the tables and Bob describes it as the greatest thing since the Keystone Cops, the afternoon Bob stood at the podium with what Don calls an elven and satanic grin and told the class to extinguish everything they had just built, the chicken named Fang that Carolyn Clark tamed and one of Don's staff later requested on purpose, and Keller Breland in a bar in 1962, half inebriated and discouraged, because he had won field championships with this method and all anybody wanted to know was where he bought the dog.

3 Key Takeaways

1. Do not reinforce what you do not want. Bob's company ran a five year study on mechanical skills in the 1960s and found that trainer error was the single biggest thing slowing a trainer down. Reinforcing too early, too late, or reinforcing the wrong thing entirely. His mantra came out of that: if you miss a behavior you wanted, fine, it will come around again. Just do not mess up.

2. Prevention beats extinction, and it is not close. This is why Don would rather teach a puppy class than a class full of older dogs. Nobody reinforces the jumping and the biting and the stealing on purpose, but they have usually been doing it for months by the time they call. Extinguishing that costs far more time and energy than never building it. Worse if the behavior you accidentally reinforced is natural for the species.

3. Knowing it and being able to do it are different things, and the field keeps confusing them. Don changed his credentials in 2022 specifically to a body that tests s