No Bad Dogs?

There is a misconception that is popularized in the dog training community that there are no bad dogs, only bad owners. This couldn’t be further from the truth. I won’t name names since it’s what seems to be the majority of trainers that have that sentiment. There are a lot of dog training theories and practices that are questionable and don’t have a lot of good quantifiable data to support their efficacy but whether there are bad dogs is extremely easy to support or disapprove and that’s what I’m about to do:

1) Some dogs don’t like people. Period. Dogs are descended from wild animals (either wolves or similar) and inherently are still animals whose personalities and genetic predispositions may tend towards fear and distrust of humans. And if you take a dog that is not inclined to like humans you have a much higher hurdle and much higher risk in making that dog into a good pet which unfortunately does translate to being a bad dog.

2) Some dogs are borderline untrainable or have extremely bad habits that are close to impossible to fix. There are multiple dogs but one in particular that I’m thinking of who was an intact male dog that tried, for lack of better words, to treat human kids as female dogs pretty consistently which is extremely dangerous since he was knocking kids down during his crazy episodes. Even with corrections, which in my opinion were not enough, he continued to do these types of things. This isn’t a good dog. You can curb some of these types of behaviors but inherently some dogs are less trainable and have behaviors that are dangerous.

3) The last category of dogs are dogs that have been so heavily abused that rehabilitation is not possible (in my opinion) such that they could be placed with a family or non professional dog handler. Shelters receive some of these types of dogs and my understanding is that they immediately put them down. The bar is way too low that they use for putting dogs down in my opinion and includes a lot of dogs that are very easily rehabilitated but there likely are a handful of dogs that practically speaking cannot be rehabilitated due to the extent of abuse and would not be trustworthy again. Unfortunately, these are not good dogs either.

I understand that this is a controversial opinion but it just is inherently true. To be clear, I think the majority (i.e. well over 99% of dogs) are great dogs and very trainable, but it’s disingenuous for dog trainers who regularly interact with many dogs to not even acknowledge that certain dogs are inherently not great pets or good dogs. Do your due diligence looking into the breeding of your potential dogs, the breed characteristics, get professional help early for training, socialize your dogs a LOT. You can stack the odds heavily in your favor to get a great dog by doing things correctly. If you end up with a dog that somehow falls into any of the categories above, get opinions from a few trainers and possibly a veterinary professional on potential health issues that may be causing the unwanted behaviors before doing anything drastic. The small subset of “bad dogs” is incredibly small and easily avoidable.