A dog that lifts its leg on your couch, or that pauses mid-walk to soak in a hydrant and then leaves one of its own, isn't staging a coup. It's talking. That single reframe — that what looks like defiance is usually communication — is the line dividing modern, evidence-minded dog trainers from the people still reaching for the prong collar. And new research out of Frontiers in Veterinary Science suggests the split isn't really about who cares more about welfare. It's about where trainers think their authority comes from: education, or experience.
I've spent enough years around training rooms and behavior consults to feel this in my gut, but the study finally put numbers and quotes to something I'd been observing informally for a decade.
What the study set out to ask
The science on aversive tools is, at this point, blunt. Shock collars, prong collars, and sharp leash corrections carry real risks to a dog's welfare and to the bond it has with the person holding the leash. Veterinary and animal-welfare bodies have said so in position statements for years. And still the tools sell, and still trainers use them, in an industry with essentially no licensing gate at the door.
Jamie DeLeeuw and T. J. Williams wanted to understand how the two camps actually reason about that contradiction. The short version, published in 2026 and summarized well by Psychology Today: both reward-based trainers and trainers who use aversives claim they care about the dog. But the reward-based group places far more weight on formal education, while the aversive group leans on their own accumulated experience and tends to dispute the research that flags the harm.
How 35 trainers were recruited
The method matters here, because it's where the study earns a little trust. The researchers ran in-depth interviews with 35 dog trainers across the U.S., sourced through the directories of three certifying bodies: the International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants (IAABC), the Certification Council for Professional Dog Trainers (CCPDT), and the International Association of Canine Professionals (IACP).
Here's the wrinkle. At the time of data collection, IAABC and CCPDT subscribed to a shared ethical framework called LIMA — Least Invasive, Minimally Aversive — which prioritizes positive reinforcement but leaves the door cracked open for aversives. (IAABC has since closed that door; its members must now use reward-based methods.) The IACP cites LIMA to justify keeping aversives on the table. So the researchers were pulling from organizations that, on paper, looked similar — yet the trainers sorted cleanly into two camps the moment you asked them what they actually do.
The reward-based group wasn't hand-picked from lifelong idealists. They were deliberately selected because they had used aversives in the past and stopped. The whole cohort consisted of crossover trainers.
Education versus experience
When I read that finding, I thought: of course. The people who left the aversive world are the best witnesses to what changed their mind.
The reward-based trainers rated classical conditioning — the slow, unglamorous work of changing how a dog feels, often used for fearful dogs, as markedly more effective than their aversive colleagues did. They rated positive punishment, the addition of an aversive to suppress a behavior, as markedly less effective. Same tools described back at you by people who tried both. The verdict flipped depending on the philosophy.
And then the part that should worry anyone paying attention: the aversive trainers, while insisting they'd moved past dominance theory, still disputed much of the scientific research on training methods. You cannot have it both ways. You've abandoned the old science that justified your dominance framing, then rejected the new science that questions your current tools. What's left isn't evidence. It's habit and identity.
The crossover trainers and the empathy factor
The trainers who switched didn't describe a sudden conversion to a spreadsheet. They described feeling more empathy toward dogs as their careers went on, paired with more exposure to positive reinforcement. For some it was a gradual drift; for others a specific "aha" moment where an aversive approach suddenly looked like what it was.
That's worth sitting with. Aversive users built their authority on experience, I've seen what works, I've done this twenty years. But the crossover experience is itself a kind of data those trainers never collected. They tried both. The empathy grew, the education landed, and the aversives fell away. DeLeeuw put the takeaway plainly: training isn't just about stopping a behavior, it's about understanding what the dog is communicating.
Reading dog scent marking as communication, not defiance
Now let me connect this to the thing most owners bring me when they think they've caught a dog being "stubborn." Dog scent marking inside the house is the classic example. The leg-lift on the armchair. The little stream on the doorframe after company leaves. The way some dogs back up, pee, and then kick, using their paws, as if kicking matters, when it's the interdigital glands doing the talking. Or the dog that squirts a tiny amount on every vertical object on a walk, or that rubs its cheeks and flanks along the sofa like it's signing the furniture.
The dominance story tells you your dog is marking to claim status over you, and the fix is to mark your own territory back, verbally, physically, with a correction. It's a tidy narrative. It's also mostly wrong, and the science of canine scent-marking is far more interesting. Marking is social communication: identity, reproductive status, emotional state, an address left for the next reader. It's driven by arousal, anxiety, novelty, and the sheer social information density of the dog's world, not by a bid to outrank you in the household hierarchy.
This is exactly the distinction the study's best quote is about. DeLeeuw notes that behaviors that look like defiance are often rooted in fear, frustration, anxiety, confusion, or a plain mismatch between what the dog needs and what the environment offers. Punish the marking and you suppress the symptom while the underlying state stays. Worse, you make the dog anxious around you doing the very thing it finds socially essential. A good trainer, as DeLeeuw says, should help both the dog and the guardian learn, not simply suppress behavior. Understanding marking as language reframes the whole response: manage the environment, address the arousal, train an incompatible behavior with rewards, and stop taking it personally.
Where the two camps genuinely agree
It's tempting to flatten this into good-versus-evil, and the study doesn't quite let you. Both groups flagged the lack of regulation as a problem. Both worried about guardians with unrealistic expectations. Both said owners routinely misread canine body language and misunderstanding of what dogs actually need. Both claimed to care about emotional well-being.
The real fault lines were narrower and more specific: whether it's acceptable for a dog to be stressed during training, and whether aversives are effective and ethical at all. Reward-based trainers said no on stress, and called positive punishment ineffective. Aversive trainers saw a necessary role for it. The shared ground was genuine. The disagreement was over a few load-bearing questions, and one of them is precisely the question the evidence has already answered, which is why one camp's stance depends on discounting that evidence.
Choosing a trainer in an unregulated field
If all of this lands on you as "great, now how do I hire one," you've reached the same frustration the trainers themselves voiced. The field has no gatekeeper, so the onus sits on you. Look for someone who will tell you, unprompted, that they use reward-based methods. Membership in a body such as the Pet Professional Guild, the IAABC, the Association of Professional Dog Trainers, or the Canadian Association of Professional Dog Trainers is a reasonable signal, not a guarantee. The American Veterinary Society for Animal Behaviour maintains a position statement on choosing a dog trainer that lays out red and green flags, read it before you spend money.
A red flag worth memorizing: any trainer who reaches for a shock or prong collar on a fearful or anxious dog, or who explains a problem behavior as the dog "dominating" you. A green flag: a trainer who can clearly explain why they do what they do, prioritizes the dog's emotional state, and treats the owner as a student rather than a hand on a leash.
The science is not the contested part
The Canadian context makes the same point from a different angle. A 2025 survey by Cavalli and Fenwick found most Canadian dog trainers use reward-based methods, and yet around a third are self-taught, with widespread concern about the absence of regulation. The methods are winning. The profession hasn't caught up, and self-taught isn't inherently bad, but self-taught plus unregulated plus a cultural reverence for "experience over education" is how prong collars keep ending up on necks.
Here's what I want guardians to hold onto. The scientific evidence on the risks of aversives is not some live controversy among people who know what they're doing; it's settled enough that dismissing it requires effort. Behaviors like dog scent marking aren't tests of your authority, they're windows into how your dog experiences the world. The trainers still suppressing those behaviors with force aren't tougher than their reward-based colleagues. They're standing on a science they've decided not to read.
References
DeLeeuw, J. L., & Williams, T. J. (2026). Professional dog trainers' perspectives on training methods: ethical and evidentiary insights. Frontiers in Veterinary Science.
Cavalli, C., & Fenwick, N. (2025). A Survey of the Professional Characteristics and Views of Dog Trainers in Canada. Animals, 15(9), 1255.
