Let’s be honest about why people hire dog trainers in the first place. You are struggling with a dog who is biting, lunging, or destroying your house, and you are desperate for help. You hand over hard-earned cash expecting a real solution.
Except, behind the polished social media reels and miracle-worker claims, the dirty secret of the pet dog world is that the long-term success rate is an absolute joke.
Don’t just take my word for it. Even prominent dog trainer Larry Krohn admitted it straight on camera:
“And if you’re going to be honest, you have to come to the realization that the true success rate—and when I say success rate, I mean everlasting success rate where the dogs really change for the better for the rest of their lives and problems go away… I think we can all admit that it is absolutely abysmal. It’s abysmal, and people don’t want to admit it. It’s disgusting the money that dog trainers charge people for no results whatsoever. And even worse than no results, where they just destroy dogs.”
Read that again. Krohn calls it: Abysmal. Disgusting amounts of money charged for zero real results, or worse, leaving animals more psychologically wrecked than before. In a roundabout way, it’s an admission that much of the commercial training world is a glorified scam.
Treating the Itch, Not the Cause
Here is why traditional trainers fail: they treat behaviors like they happen in a vacuum.
Think about it like your own body. If you have an itch, you scratch it. You don’t just sit on your hands and force yourself to stop moving; you figure out what’s causing the itch and fix it.
Every single dog behavior is just a symptom. Whether a dog is hyperactive, reactive, or aggressive, something in their environment or internal state is driving that action. But traditional trainers ignore the cause entirely. Instead, they slap a prong collar or an e-shock collar on the dog, crank up the pressure, and force the animal to suppress the symptom.
Sure, you might get compliance while the tool is cranked tight or while you are sitting in a sterile training facility. But the moment you take that collar off or the dog faces a real-world trigger, the behavior comes roaring back—often worse because the dog is now terrified and stressed out on top of everything else.
There is No Money in Fixing the Problem
Want to know why the industry relies so heavily on symptom suppression? Follow the money.
There is zero profit in teaching cause and effect.
When you actually figure out what is driving a dog’s behavior, change the environment, and fix the root cause, something radical happens: the problem goes away permanently.
And once an everyday dog owner truly understands the cause of their dog’s behavior, they will never need to hire a trainer again or spend another cent.
An industry built on symptom suppression needs repeat customers, maintenance packages, and endless “refresher” courses to stay afloat. If they actually fixed your dog the first time, they’d put themselves out of business. True behavior work isn’t about trapping you in a cycle of paying for endless obedience classes; it’s about teaching you what’s really going on so you can make yourself—and your trainer—obsolete.
