On the other end of the scale we find professional dog trainers who take customer's dogs into their kennel for training. The vast majority of these trainers use far too much force. I have already said to a pro "time is money". These pros can force a dog into submission a lot quicker than they can take it through marker training.

Thirty five to forty years ago people trained dogs almost exclusively with force. Read the old William Kohler books. William Koehler is the model-T of the dog training world. I read them when I was 16 and thought they were the cat's ass. Since then I have come to realize that Koehler was the master of yank and crank training.

In recent years the pendulum has swung to the other end of the spectrum. Today clickers and head halters with no corrections are the fad. Trainers try and REDIRECT a dog out of a aggressive behavioral problem - what a joke that is. This approach only works in a very small percentage of dogs with extremely soft temperaments.

The result is an explosion of family pets with dominant and aggressive dog problems. Take a look at the emails I get from people who have been dog bit. The vast majority of these bites happen because of a lack of pack structure and a lack of sound dog training.

Once again the correct position is in the middle. The difference between a good trainer and a great trainer is that the great trainer will always maintain a balance point between motivation and correction.