I had another interesting Dog Support meeting this evening with someone (I won’t use gender or place) who had a real and difficult dog problem. I liked her a lot.

She is a passionate animal lover, a dog, and a horse person out West who rescued an abandoned and shell-shocked border collie from a rescue group (those are some of the most frightening words in the dog world).

Her problem is that the border collie is a traumatized obsessive who has challenged her patience and peace of mind. He’s driving her crazy. I can’t offer the details.

I kept asking her how she had handled her problem (which is genuinely disturbing), and it took a while before she blurted out that she had behaved shamefully. And a bit longer before she told me the shameful behavior: “I yell at  him sometimes.”

She clearly expected me to be horrified or outraged, and I realized that she had fallen victim to the new extreme ethos of many in the dog movement that demands everyone with a dog be St. Therese or another rich saint with big fences and no day job. They equate losing your temper with a dog akin to serial killing.

Some of the rescue people have just seen too much. There is no time in the history of dogs where dog lovers were expected to never raise their voices to a dog, or worse. My mother adored our Bassett Hound Sam, but when he reached up on the table and stole the food from our plates, she was not about swatting him on the butt with a rolled-up newspaper.

If he felt it or even noticed, he never showed it and never stopped grabbing our food. We have more sophisticated training methods today, but unfortunately, we are still human beings.

I am a long-time champion of positive reinforcement training; it is the training I use. But I also admit to being human sometimes, and most of us are. I yell at my dogs when they blow me off or eat something that isn’t theirs or if they try to jump on people. I also train them well; they are wonderful, happy, obedient spoiled, and loving creatures. We love them back.

Bud came to us as a traumatized and savagely abused rescue dog from Arkansas, I trained for two years, and yes, I did yell at him to get his attention when he lifted a leg next to the sofa and spotted a chipmunk or squirrel (or moth) during training.

I wrote once on the blog that I had kicked Fate (stuck my foot out, to be precise) to keep her from running into the busy highway when she was a puppy. I believe I saved her life. I will never be forgiven.

I understand why this woman was ashamed to talk to me tonight about her training; I get e-mails from people who say they are dog lovers and consider me the same way the world viewed Adolf Eichmann.

One woman e-mailed me the other day to say she would never seek advice from a man who kicked a dog.

My wish for dogs is that they all could have the lives my dogs live with Maria and me. I told her I wouldn’t want to work with her either. We are not a good match, and that is important when it comes to Dog Support.

I liked this woman in my Dog Support meeting tonight very much, and we went over a bunch of training options she had not heard of or considered. She is impressive, bright, compassionate, dedicated, and human. She was crazy about the dog, who loved to run alongside her when she rode her horse.

Her problem is soluble, she can figure it out,  and I also told her never to speak of herself in such a poor way.

For one thing, she has absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. If every person with a dog felt mortified because they raised their voices at times, we’d have very few dogs in this country if we were honest. I wouldn’t have any.

How did we get to be such tightasses?

I told her that her dog seemed sensitive and devoted to her. She needed to get her head straight, though. The problem was her, not the dog. She had saved the dog’s life and given him a wonderful home. She had absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. She was really frightened about exerting her authority.

I told her she had to clear her head to try some new and very positive training tricks we discussed, look the dog in the eyes, and think: I love you, and you love me. But you must stop this behavior that is driving me nuts. And mean it.

I advised her to stop speaking to the dog when he misbehaved and only speak to him when he was behaving. And shower him with praise, treats if necessary, and a happy voice.

And I urged her never again to think or speak poorly of herself in front of her dog, or in her own mind. That will poison her training.

We agreed to stay in touch. I want to know how this one turns out.

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As you can tell, I love this work, and I mostly think it’s about time. You can schedule a Dog Support session by sending me an e-mail: at [email protected]. If we are right for each other, we will meet on Zoom or the phone. I think it’s working; I’m now scheduling four weekly sessions for now —$ 50 for a half hour.