Oh no, did you accidentally reward your puppy’s bad behavior??
Just kidding lol. I don’t care.
I mean, I used to wrestle with my puppy, Flower, and let her play bite me (the horror!) Now that she’s an adult, I can’t get her to play bite me no matter how hard I try.
My other puppy, River? I let her out of the crate when she cried. Comforted her when she was scared. Now as an adult, she’s incredibly resilient and perfectly fine to be left alone.
Apparently, I break all the puppy training rules. Still end up with dogs who are chill, confident, and like spending time with me. What can I say. I’m a rebel. 😎
The dog training world taught you to never let bad behavior get rewarded or else you’ll ruin your pup forever. And let me guess – this has stolen your last shred of excitement and replaced it with a mantra that plays over and over in your head:
Don’t screw up. Don’t screw up. DON’T SCREW UP.
Enough.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying “oh it’s fine, just let your puppy get into all the trouble they want because they’ll somehow magically outgrow it someday!” But I am saying that it’s totally possible to raise a great dog without all this “one wrong move and you’re DOOMED!” stress.
Let me tell you a little story.
I used to be part of the problem
For a long time, our online puppy program Puppy Survival School was based around the “Core Strategy:”
Prevent unwanted behavior from getting reinforced, while training and reinforcing behavior you like.
Or even simpler: prevent bad, reward good.
I started teaching this approach more than ten years ago, when I created our first guide to raising a puppy without losing your mind.
At the time, I was just beginning to specialize in the What The **** Was I Thinking phase (aka the “puppy blues”). I didn’t yet have a firm grasp on all the intricacies of this phenomenon. I just knew these new dog owners were exhausted and overwhelmed by thoughts like:
“I can’t do this.”
“I made a mistake.”
“I should give the puppy back.”
My theory: all the advice out there was too complicated. Maybe people just couldn’t hold onto dozens of rules, checklists, and techniques. That’s a lot to ask when you’re sleep-deprived and hanging by a thread.
So I thought it would help if they had a simple framework. One easy-to-remember guideline:
Prevent bad. Reward good.
That mantra became the cornerstone of Puppy Survival School.
And… it worked.
It gave people a sense of direction.
But the longer I do this work, the colder that approach feels. It takes what should be a mad, wild, magical adventure and reduces it to something clinical and black-and-white.
That simple framework might relieve people of the “ahhh I don’t know what I’m doing” panic, but it trades it for a different kind of stress: analyzing every single moment like it’s a math problem.
- “If I let him out of the crate while he’s barking, am I just rewarding the barking?”
- “If I give her attention right now, am I reinforcing demand behavior?”
- “If I let her pick up that stick, am I allowing a bad habit to form?“
- “If I let my puppy go back home when he’s scared on a walk, am I teaching him that he can boss me around?”
- “If I blink at the wrong moment, am I going to turn her into a monster??”
And that’s just one of many problems with this method. It can also backfire and make things MUCH worse if used in the wrong situation.
Like this:
It’s 6pm, the humans are cranky and exhausted. The puppy is in a hyper bitey mood. He’s confined in his pen. Human steps into pen, puppy bites. Human immediately leaves the pen and ignores the puppy.
After a few seconds, human steps back into the pen, and the cycle repeats until everyone gets even more pissed off, and the puppy is so frustrated and confused that he starts biting even harder.
Sometimes it’s appropriate to remove your attention from a puppy who is biting you. Sometimes. Depending on the context and the reason the puppy is biting in that moment. But most of the time, it just adds fuel to the fire. Because puppies bite for a lot of reasons, including loneliness and confusion. It can be a bid for connection and a cry for help.
How would you feel if you were lonely and/or confused, and you reached out to the person you trust most and said “I need help,” but they just turned their back and ignored you?
Real life is too complex and nuanced for this
When you’re constantly analyzing your dog, you stop seeing them.
When you try to apply the same rule to every single situation, you never learn how to handle complexity.
When you’re afraid of messing everything up, you stop thinking clearly. You stop trusting yourself.
And you definitely stop having any fun.
Ironically, this is exactly what I was trying to avoid in the first place.
At the 3 Lost Dogs Academy, we do our best to be a refuge from the drama and unrealistic standards of the Dog World – a world that sure seems to delight in telling people that their dog’s behavior is all their fault and that any mistake is a catastrophe.
And I think we do a good job of this with our overall messaging and vibe.
But last year, it really hit me: as long as “Prevent Bad, Reward Good” was our foundation, we were still part of the problem.
We can do better.
We’d been developing a new methodology through our work with one-on-one private training students. We weren’t planning on updating Puppy Survival School with the new approach right away; I had too many other projects on my to-do list.
But that summer, something snapped in my brain.
I was writing promotional content for social media (a necessary evil if we want to, you know, pay our bills), and I just… couldn’t do it.
I could not ask people to spend money on something I no longer believed in.
Erin and I are both over the Dog World’s obsessive focus on reinforcement and consequences. (Not to mention the endless discourse about the Four Quadrants of Operant Conditioning like it’s a sacred text. Yawn)
Do those things matter? Sure. But not as your core strategy.
It’s like sugary cereal: great as one small part of a balanced breakfast. On its own, it’s liable to give you a crash and leave you hungry for something more. Something real.
So yeah. I couldn’t promote the Old Ways a single minute longer.
I got to work rebuilding the primary course in Puppy Survival School, Foundation for a Happy, Well-Behaved Puppy.
Over two weeks, I turned all the scattered, disorganized bits of our new approach into a cohesive new core strategy.
Exactly how I felt during this process
Guys, it even has an acronym:
The Puppy PEACE Roadmap
Puppy Survival School is now centered around this signature framework.
The old approach unintentionally created pressure to be perfect and could make people feel like they’re perpetually one mistake away from ruining everything.
The new approach is way more chill. More well-rounded and nuanced. It throws out the laser-focus on reinforcement. (Or, in hindsight, the unhinged obsession with reinforcement)
The new guiding philosophy: empathy over micromanagement
I thought people in the WTFWIT phase needed a ridiculously simple mantra. But after ten years helping hundreds more people through this phase, I realized I was wrong:
It’s not that they needed simpler advice. They just needed advice they could believe in. They needed hope.
Because when you believe things can get better, you stop panicking. You become capable of handling nuance and absorbing new information. Capable of being resilient and taking setbacks in stride.
I do still think it helps to have a simple “north star” to guide you.
How about this one:
Empathy.
Your puppy isn’t a little robot who needs programming.
They’re a baby. A baby who just lost their family. Who’s overwhelmed, confused, exhausted, lonely, and trying their best in a world where nothing makes sense.
The moment you give yourself permission to feel that – to imagine what your puppy is going through, to connect with your own humanity – you turn a corner.
Empathy is the thread that ties everything together. It’s the heart of the PEACE Strategy.
Instead of oversimplified formulas, this is what we teach our students now:
How to address WHY your dog is doing the thing you don’t want
Dogs don’t persist in their obnoxious behavior because you “rewarded” it once or twice; they do it because they have unmet needs.
Until you meet those needs, no amount of consistency or corrections or ignoring bad behavior will solve anything.
So instead of fussing so much about consequences, we prioritize reducing the motivation behind unwanted behavior. Because if a dog doesn’t have any motivation to do the “bad” thing, they just don’t do it. Even if you accidentally reward it sometimes.
How to make good choices with the information they already have
If you’ve tried everything to solve your puppy problems but nothing works, you don’t need more tips and tricks. You’re DROWNING in tips and tricks, amirite?
The real problem is that no one ever taught you how to make good choices about which tips to use and when to use them. When you should “be consistent,” and when you should adapt and do something differently.
To explain what I mean, let’s go back to that puppy biting example:
Like I said, biting doesn’t always mean the same thing. Sometimes it means “I’m bored.”
Or “I’m overstimulated.”
Or “I have no idea what you want from me.”
Or “I need social interaction.”
And if you use the same response every time, you’re going to get it wrong a lot.
But once you learn how to read what’s actually happening in the moment (and choose your response accordingly) that’s when you start getting somewhere. You stop frantically throwing random advice at the biting in a blind panic. You start feeling grounded and confident instead of defeated and paralyzed by self-doubt.
And your puppy starts settling down because they’re finally getting what they need from you.
This is what we do in Puppy Survival School.
Nuance! Depth! It’s kind of our whole thing these days.
We don’t just add more dog training advice to the pile; we teach you how to make good choices about the dog training advice that’s already in your pile.
So if social media and puppy class are leaving you with more questions than answers, come hang out with us.
