I’ve written many times that dog training in America is a catastrophe, study after study has found that only the smallest percentage of dogs – three to five per cent – are trained at all, and hardly any are well trained.

We have a corporate system of dog training, books and videos and TV shows worth billions of dollars that show us how a handful of people with assistants and savvy marketing skills can do with dogs that hardly any of us can do.

The idea – spawned by even the best trainers like the New Skete Monks or Cesar Millan – that there is one way for everyone to train their dogs and only they know it –  is absurd. It teaches dog owners how to feel stupid and incompetent, it causes them to abandon training when they can’t flip a Pit Bull in 30 minutes the way they see Cesar and his 20 assistants do.

Dog lovers have come to see training as something only a few experienced or mystically gifted whisperers know how to do. So they give up on doing it. That is the true story of dog training in America.

This week, Maria called my radio show – she is a weekly contributor now, a great addition to this experiment – and we talked about the difficulties we have had training our intense, bright and fiercely independent border collie Fate.

She is loaded with instinct but not the toughness required to push sheep around. This may be my fault, but Fate is, to me, the Ferdinand of border collies. She loves the sheep too much to push them around like Red or Rose. And I didn’t want to push her, I feared it would break her great spirit.

We love her all the same, and she has become a devoted and adored companion to Maria, by her side when she works in her studio and when she walks in the woods.

One problem we have always had with Fate is that she balks at coming out of the pasture when our chores are done. One or the other of us has been yelling at her for several years. She just won’t leave the sheep unless we shout at her, which neither of us likes to do. But which we do every day. Who is the dumb animal here?

This was our fault not hers. The first rule of training is that it’s almost always the human’s fault, rarely the dogs. To train a dog, you have to know yourself.

But there is also reality: we are both busy and distractable people, with a lot on our minds. It takes up to 2,000 repetitions to get a dog to fully grasp a behavior. How many of you have the time or will to do that?

While talking to Maria about this, it became clear to both  of us that Maria likes having a somewhat “bad” dog, who is resistant to being told what to do, just as she is.

She loves the wild and sometimes “bad” Fate.

We haven’t really given up shouting at her – it works eventually – so we have enabled and reinforced this behavior.

Once or twice a day I can hear Maria shouting with a deep and firm voice: “Fate! Come!” Maria loves Fate and does not want to have this kind of relationship with her,  yet neither of us really doubled down on training her out of this annoying but tolerable habit.

After all, she always does come, and she is otherwise a wonderfully responsive, obedient and loving dog.

This conversation on the radio rang a bell in Maria’s head, and she suddenly got religion and was interested in dealing with this differently. We did not watch Cesar, or buy one of his $2o books on how to have a “Perfect Dog,” a noxious title on many different levels. (Do you have a “perfect dog?” Would you really want one? Have you ever met one?)

We didn’t need the Monks up on their mountain to figure this out, and we didn’t need to buy a $30 training video to help us. We are two smart, independent and dog-loving people, one of whom writes about dogs. Why didn’t we think we could figure this out by ourselves? Because we didn’t care that much.

Maria has taken up the task, and when she takes up the task, things tend to happen. Me too.

What I saw happening was that Maria would leave the pasture with Fate in it, go do other farm chores like tend the chickens, then come up to the back door, turn and shout to Fate, who is by now 50 feet away, to “come.”

We had taught Fate to be a Multiple Choice Dog in this regard, we shouted commands at her so loudly and often that she learned to choose which one she might eventually obey. She usually likes the fourth or fifth command.

A reliable alarm bell in dog training is when you find yourself shouting at your dog. That is a sure sign that you have messed up, and your dog has gotten the best of you. Shouting never, ever works in the long run, and it’s not the kind of spiritual relationship we all dream of having.

(I must confess I have never shouted at Red, mostly because he has trained me so well.)

Shouting at Fate is bad dog training, and bad Karma.

I should have known better. I suggested taking Fate out with her when she leaves the pasture, and giving Fate the command to “come out” when she is a few feet away, not 50 feet. I know that one never gives a dog a command unless we can make them obey it, otherwise we are teaching them to fail. I don’t need one of my books or anybody’s books to tell me this.

Maria is one of the smartest people I have ever known, yet she was certain figuring this out was beyond her, was something only a dog whisperer could do. That is the awful legacy of the Training Guru culture. She wrote about this dilemma on her blog.

So yesterday, she came up to Fate while both were in the pasture – she is a dog with tremendous, even hypnotic, instinct – and said quietly “Fate, come,” and Fate got up and walked out of the pasture with her. It was really as simple as that, although there may be missteps and confusion for awhile.

I cautioned Maria that this would take a long while, and she doesn’t have much of an attention span herself, her head is always full of art.  She is much like Fate, which is part of the problem. We taught Fate this habit, and it will take a lot of and patience to break it.

But we learned a lot about ourselves in this discussion. We learned once again that everyone is different, and no single training method covers everybody. Every dog is different, every environment is different, every person is different. We each have to find our own way, and learn to see ourselves clearly as well as the dog.

There is no one way for all of us, and we are smarter than we think once we trust our own instincts. You have to know yourself if you want to know your dog, and we learned that Carolyn Wilki, my first great trainer was right.

To have a better dog, you have to be a better human.