As a caveat – this isn’t about blame. This isn’t about judgement. Behavioral psychology deals only in cold hard facts.
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
— Mark Twain
There is no better definition of pride than that. Pride isn’t just being happy with your work; it’s the rigid, unyielding certainty that your view of the world is the only correct one.
And in the dog training world, that kind of pride is an ugly, silent epidemic. Your ego is costing your dog their progress.
We love to feel like the benevolent leaders, the masters of connection, or the brilliant tacticians who can outsmart a behavioral issue with a handful of high-value treats and a clicker. But when a dog is highly reactive or aggressive, they aren’t operating on the level of social niceties. They are operating on survival, stress, and deeply ingrained behavioral contingencies.
The moment a trainer or owner insists on being “right” instead of being effective, the dog pays the price. Swallowing your pride means stepping away from what you “know for sure” and looking at what is actually happening in front of you.
It means admitting a few uncomfortable realities:
A true behaviorist doesn’t actually focus on behaviors. This is the ultimate paradox that pride prevents people from seeing. If you are only looking at the surface—trying to suppress the barking, the lunging, or the snapping—you are just playing behavioral whack-a-mole to satisfy your own need for a quick, quiet fix. A real practitioner looks past the symptom. You have to focus on the underlying emotional state driving that behavior, and deeper still, the environmental variables driving that emotion that is driving the behavior. If you don’t shift the root cause, you haven’t changed a thing.
Your favorite method might be failing. If you’ve spent six months “redirecting” a red-zone dog with food and the dog is still blowing up at every trigger, the data is screaming at you. Staying the course just to preserve your ideological purity or protect your reputation isn’t training; it’s stubbornness.
The dog sets the criteria, not your timeline. You don’t get to decide when a dog “should” be over something. If you push a dog into a situation they aren’t ready for just because you want to show off their progress to a neighbor or a client, you are feeding your own ego at the expense of their threshold.
True behaviorism doesn’t care about your feelings. A functional analysis of behavior is cold, clinical, and entirely honest. It requires you to look at what is actually reinforcing or punishing a behavior, not what you wish was happening. Sometimes, that means swallowing the bitter pill that a behavior you thought you were fixing is actually being maintained by your own well-intentioned reactions.
The best behaviorists aren’t the ones who never make mistakes. They are the ones who can look at the data, realize that what they “knew for sure” just ain’t so, swallow their pride, and pivot immediately for the sake of the animal.