If you want to understand why modern dog training is full of snake-oil promises, buzzwords, and band-aids, you have to look at how the founders of the commercial pet industry hid their history.
Two names laid the foundation for the multi-million dollar pet training industry we see today: Mary Burch (the Board Certified Behavior Analyst who headed the AKC’s Canine Good Citizen program) and Ian Dunbar (the veterinarian who founded the Association of Professional Dog Trainers and popularized lure-reward puppy classes).
On the surface, they presented themselves as modern, compassionate professionals who brought science to everyday dog owners.
In reality? They took 19th-century military compulsion, slapped a “positive” coat of paint on it, and bastardized B.F. Skinner’s science to build a commercial empire.
Mary Burch and “A Toast to Most”
In 1990, Mary Burch published an article in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis titled “A Toast to Most: Konrad Most, a 1910 Pioneer in Animal Training”.
Who was Konrad Most?
Konrad Most was a Prussian police and military dog trainer who published his manual in 1910. He didn’t train pet dogs with treats—he trained working dogs using severe physical force, choke chains, spiked collars, and pain to compel absolute obedience. Most’s system was simple: force compliance through mechanical pain, then offer food or fondling as “primary inducements” once the dog submits.
So why was a leading behavior analyst like Mary Burch raising a toast to the godfather of military compulsion?
Because Burch and her academic colleagues wanted to prove that operant conditioning applied to dogs. Instead of doing true functional analysis, she sanitized Konrad Most’s brutal coercion. She stripped away the pain and spike collars, praised Most for noticing basic reinforcement concepts, and used his framework to legitimize standardized obedience tests like the AKC Canine Good Citizen (CGC) program.
She bastardized Skinner’s work by taking a science built on discovering the environmental root causes of behavior and reducing it to a rubber-stamp checklist for suburban pet obedience.
Ian Dunbar: Swapping the Spike Collar for a Liver Treat
Ian Dunbar saw what Burch and the AKC were doing, and he recognized the goldmine.
Dunbar knew Konrad Most’s work—anyone with a background in veterinary science in that era did. But Dunbar knew you couldn’t sell Prussian military compulsion to suburban families with golden retrievers.
So Dunbar pulled off the ultimate commercial pivot:
- He took Konrad Most’s concept of “primary inducements” (food lures).
- He stripped out the visible physical corrections.
- He rebranded the four quadrants of operant conditioning as a commercial gospel.
Dunbar told the world that dog training was as simple as swapping out choke chains for liver treats. He built SIRIUS Dog Training and the APDT around a simple promise: Slap a food lure in front of the dog, manage the symptom, and call it science.
Dunbar can’t deny knowing what he was pushing. He knew he wasn’t doing Radical Behaviorism. He knew he wasn’t doing functional analysis. He took the same surface-level, stimulus-response mechanics used by mid-century compulsion trainers, traded the correction for a bribe, and sold it as a “positive revolution.”
The Lie at the Heart of the Industry
This is the hypocrisy of the commercial dog training industry:
- Mary Burch literally wrote a praise piece for the father of military compulsion while standardizing suburban pet tests for the AKC.
- Ian Dunbar took that exact same stimulus-response framework, swapped the choke collar for a food treat, and called himself a revolutionary.
Neither of them ever looked for root cause. Neither of them asked why a dog exhibits aggression, drive, or reactivity in its environment.
They took B.F. Skinner’s life work, gutted the functional analysis, and turned it into a commercial game of treat-tossing and obedience drills. And when food luring fails to stop real drive mechanics in the real world? The modern “experts” who followed in their footsteps throw up their hands, blame the dog, and recommend permanent isolation or Behavioral Euthanasia.
Stop buying the marketing. Swapping physical force for food bribes isn’t behavior work. It’s the same old symptom manipulation wrapped in a nicer package.