Why the Word 'Discipline' Makes Me Squirrelly

Being a run-of-the-mill friendly neighbourhood dog trainer, I often hear from my clients that their dogs need discipline. I do love sitting across the kitchen table from my clients, who are just about my favourite people in the whole world: people who love their dogs enough to call in outside help, and at no small expense and bother. But the word ‘discipline’ always gives me pause—it’s a word that brings up a wheelbarrow full of feelings. Because this is the flat and bald truth of the matter: discipline and dogs just don’t go together.

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To wit: the Merriam-Webster definition of discipline includes “punishment inflicted by way of correction and training”. For dogs, this would include outdated and outmoded techniques such as shock collars, striking dogs, choke chains, and the like: harming dogs in order to change their behaviour. Luckily for dogs and luckily for my heart, these techniques are becoming both less common and less acceptable to the general public than they used to be, and a future without them is now in sight. They simply aren’t needed—everything we want to train dogs to do can be accomplished using rewards-based training (yes, even if your Uncle Ralph disagrees and tosses out phrases like ‘red flag dog’…he’s just wrong).

But the definition also includes “the rigor or training effect of experience, adversity” and “training to act in accordance with rules”. For humans, with our complex human societies made up of complex human families, being disciplined about our paid and unpaid work has real value. Discipline is tied up with our concept of morality, and allows us to function and thrive. It’s a part of what keeps us fed, friendly, and free from harm.

So in some of its senses at least, discipline matters to humans. But does it matter to dogs? As much as we share with our dogs—we’re both tetrapods, we both love food and fun, we live in social groups, and we both learn through operant and classical conditioning—we don’t share human morality. Dogs are not moral creatures. They are just as centuries of selective breeding and millennia of evolution has made them: perfect, wonderful, furry, carnivorous, …canines. Expecting them to interpret their worlds in human ways is to deny them who and what they are.

Imposing ‘discipline’ on dogs, either in the form of corrective punishment or by thinking we must impose some regimen on them to counter their alleged moral decrepitude, is, well, plum wrongheaded. Dogs are adult organisms. They do as adult organisms do: they make a living in the world, they learn to navigate their environments, they seek things they enjoy and they avoid things they don’t. Luckily for dogs and luckily for my heart, training dogs to behave in ways that makes them easier to be around for us humans is healthy and fun for both us and our dogs, if done right (I promise). It’s enriching and it’s enjoyable and dogs, given the choice, will participate with glee. But we aren’t creating discipline, nor are we creating disciplined animals. We’re simply benefitting from their natural abilities to learn and their natural motivations.

Much to my relief, usually when I hear the word discipline uttered by my clients it’s followed quickly with the phrase (and accompanied by a guilty sidelong glance), “I’m not a very good disciplinarian.”

Well thank goodness for that, I inevitably reply. That’s a beautiful place to start.