As you’ve probably realized, I’ve been writing a great deal this year about the current epistemic tribalism in the dog training world. And there’s a reason for that. With the last book in my series launching soon, this will be a case closed for me, just as many cases have been closed with the earlier books, which has always been the real purpose of the series: to close chapters.

But there are recent events I need to address, so I’m writing a long post here that you can share whenever similar situations come up. Unlike some individuals, my habitat is not on social media, and I only become aware of situations involving me when someone tells me about them.

First, about assumptions. Every time I read a criticism of my work, I learn something about myself I didn’t know. It’s interesting how readily we can assume the shape of other people’s lives and treat that assumption as fact, simply because it doesn’t withstand scrutiny. One such assumption is that I keep my comments closed because I’m afraid of being scrutinized. Perhaps the better-educated question would be why I don’t keep my comment sections open. And I could answer that quickly. My approach to social media is simply different. I value my time, and I invest it only where it’s deserved. I have a pinned post on my profile that clearly asks people to contact me by email, since I prefer to centralize my communications, and I’m confident that anyone willing to spend one extra minute doing so will bring a thoughtful, considered message, instead of the kind of time-consuming content we see in those ping-pong comment threads.

Second, “kill the messenger.” Another common tactic on social media. Disregard the message and try to destroy the messenger whenever the topic doesn’t fit someone’s personal requirements. I have some in-depth articles (not “papers,” as some people are falsely claiming, because I never once said I have “papers” on my blog, even though I do hold my writing to a certain structure as a self-imposed standard), and they carry references to support them, so any disagreement should be addressed to those authors, which has never happened. In fact, some comments and shares of my work simply troll and condescend toward it, instead of clearly stating what is wrong, where, and how, with supporting references. Being independent still means following certain rules, which is a separate thing from being held hostage by a system, and anyone who can tell the difference between a social feed, a comment section, an article, and a paper knows exactly what I mean.

Third, scrutiny. Social media is NOT a place of scrutiny, and it never will be. If, for some reason, it were, and if I also wanted to be condescending, I would ask why I should want to be scrutinized by profiles that offer none of their own, profiles that are closed, unnamed, with nothing on record that anyone could examine in return. Or by “influencers” who, without AI, would not be in this field at all. Choosing to stay outside academia does not mean I’m unaware of how it operates, and I still contribute to it through publications and empirical work, as a quick search would show. Even if it were a peer-reviewed paper, and I currently have a couple of papers going through peer review at a journal, and someone disagreed, they would always find a way to discredit it, whether through the journal, through the arguments, or through the supposedly weak peer-review process. But forming a judgment about my integrity and my independent work on nothing more than assumptions tells me two things. If someone does not belong to academia, an open comment section was never going to teach them the whole academic process, the entire education system worldwide, its nuances and complexities, and how independent research and private education actually work. And if they do belong, they are a perfect example of why I chose to step away from formal academia.

Fourth, the feeling of anarchy. Every society has rules and laws, even when you sit in a different country, defaming others. Two episodes here.

The first involved a well-known “influencer” who began with a comment on a public post, placing my name beside a specific claim that I actively defend and teach aversive control, and tying me to an organization I neither represent nor belong to. I asked for one thing. One sentence, from anything I have written, taught, or presented, that would carry that claim. If it existed, I said, post it, and I would answer in full. What came back was an actual sentence of mine, cut in half. It ended at “do not constitute fairness,” with an ellipsis marking the spot where the quotation stopped. The sentence does not end there. It continues, saying that kindness and the avoidance of aversives do not constitute fairness in this sense, because fairness is settled by whether the contingency allows the individual to function as an effective agent in its own learning, rather than by the emotional register of the practitioner. Those words come from a text of mine titled “What Makes a Correction Unfair?”, which treats fairness as a matter of procedural clarity and holds reinforcement and correction to the very same standard. Read in full, the text says the opposite of what was posted. The words were handpicked, the half that gives them their meaning was removed, and the source was left off, so that no one reading along could go and place the fragment in context for themselves.

The same thing happened with the mention of a second article of mine, “Aversives in Science,” which had been used for its functional definition of an aversive. That article states in plain terms that these distinctions justify the defense of no method and no tool, and it closes by describing work that lowers pressure and relies on nothing coercive. The piece cited against me is the piece that refutes the charge. The functional definition itself is an ordinary concept in behavioral science rather than a private view of mine, and anyone can confirm it in the literature without my help. Even after being caught in the lie, that person offered not a single apology and not even a simple retraction, which amounts to a clear defamation with legal consequences. The discussion is public, so anyone can confirm it, and screenshots have been saved in a folder I’m preparing for when the time comes. The same applies to the second situation below.

The second grew out of my approach to explaining scientific processes, to sit with everyone at the same table even when we disagree, and perhaps because this unusual approach, which takes courage, gets misread from the comfort of a keyboard, I’m being attacked for supposedly riding in a “clown car (…) to present unadulterated garbage.” I’m also being labeled a “clone,” or tied to individuals and institutions I left behind a long time ago. By the way, I have passed through so many institutions, from graduations to jobs to awards, that a simple human search would turn them up and avoid this clear obsession. All these comments went through several edits, and the specific mention of me was removed from the main comment, perhaps once it was realized how unfair they were being, but it remains public in the edit history, which I have also screenshotted and saved to my folder alongside the earlier ones. In these comments, scientists are also publicly making assumptions about their peers and treating them as facts, as if words were patented, as if they were speaking through private channels about such serious subjects. What is also curious is how people now lean entirely on AI for their research, concluding that if it returns no results, then the thing must not exist, as though AI could access private documentation or portfolios held by private institutions. Only those standing outside the abyss can really see how serious these actions are.

Fifth, where do I stand? Nowhere. I don’t attach labels to my work, since I find them limiting. This approach, as I’ve already said, is unusual, I know, and there’s a price to pay for it, being attacked by the very people who should appreciate what I’m doing. And it isn’t only “one side.” I’m often caught in a crossfire, a price I’m willing to pay in the name of my integrity and my freedom of thought, kept clear of what I call epistemic tribalism, where groups dictate what may be said or posted, what evidence counts, and impose a checklist of requirements before you qualify as a “credible person.” I also know that in the current, almost hysterical online dog-training world, the word “independent” is read as hostile, even among academics, especially by those desperate to tie me to particular institutions, tools, or training mindsets. And unlike them, I don’t care about the virtual world. I don’t live here, I’m not here to please anyone, and if I still use social media, which I call the “necessary evil”, it’s only to preserve its original function of connecting people. 

So if one day they’re willing to accept that the science they defend contradicts them on several points, I’ll be glad to walk that road in full, evidence and literature included, and I suspect it would be a longer walk for some of them than for me. I have no problem explaining the science behind well-defined terms such as punishment, aversives, reinforcers, suppression, and so on. Explaining them is a separate thing from “teaching” or endorsing them, or attaching them to abuse or violence. If I explain them, it’s because there is real violence happening in the field in their name, and neglect on both sides, because unqualified people are simply repeating techniques without understanding what they’re doing. Any honest person knows there is always some degree of aversiveness in the environment, and the way the endocrine system processes information also creates a degree of stress. It’s unavoidable, and the entire body of academic literature on the subject confirms it. So why hide it, as some people seem to want? I explain them and try to share knowledge and awareness with everyone willing to listen, so that they understand them, start to identify where violence, mistreatment, and lack of knowledge occur, and indirectly realize their technical and ethical limits.

The image attached to this post shows a slide from a long presentation on signal precision, the one called “garbage”, on how we ourselves should recognize that our attitude, our planning, our knowledge, and our standing as a different species form one of the main pillars of interspecies communication, where methods and tools are secondary, but maybe this message and applied knowledge is deeper than some inquisitors are used to. And this brings me to another subject. I don’t endorse, support, or condemn methods or tools, largely for the reason I just gave. Here, too, I find myself in the crossfire. On one side, I’m attacked for saying I’m against banning tools, since they’re only a symptom of a larger problem that no ban will solve. A fool with a tool, any tool, will still be a fool without one, and maybe more dangerous, as the only video on my Facebook profile shows this clearly. Besides, even in countries where certain tools are banned, people simply order them from abroad, and with insufficient oversight, the law ends up supporting nothing more than a bureaucratic, useless process. I’ve written about this at length in my second book. Then, from the other side, I’m attacked because I believe some regulation of dog training practice should exist as a starting point. There are unqualified people on both sides, and the start of such regulation, drafted not by the current ideological actors but by independent experts from different fields with no direct ties to the animal world and its subfields, would be a discussion worth having.

Underneath all of this sits something simple, and it’s the part I most want you to see. I describe how these well-defined scientific concepts work. Describing a process is science. Deciding what we ought to do with that knowledge is ethics. What is happening now is that some individuals are taking everything I say or do, attaching a moral verdict to it that I never wrote or held, planting that verdict in my life as if it were a fact, and then arguing with it. That is a third conversation, and I’m being held responsible for never having had it inside my work, which was only ever about the first.

For the record, I belong to no organization, and I represent none. I’m an independent researcher and practitioner trying to act as a moderator in a conversation that has lost its temper, someone bringing the raw science and its processes back to the table, because I believe knowledge is what makes real change possible. It’s easy to pass judgment on a room you never entered and a sentence you only half-read. So any attempt to tie me to particular people or institutions is a profound lie. And anyone is welcome to attend something I present and see for themselves what I teach, and how I teach it in practice.

And I’ll go further. I’m making public the clips of some of my work, the ones I use in my mentoring program. Click here to see them. See for yourself how “aversive” and “abusive” I am and teach. Of course, one side will say I use the word “no” without realizing that it functions as a signal rather than as a consequence within the contingency I explain in my fourth book and with my students. The other side will say it’s basic and adds nothing to the training. But this is something I’ve been working with for more than two decades, and at this point, nothing here is new to me. There are two points here. The first, if you hold an assumption or a belief, no argument or fact will move you, and you’ll only see things from your own perspective. And the second, which follows from the first and may be something you never realized, is this. I don’t want to change you. I don’t want to dictate who you should be. What I do is present the scientific processes, which exist whether or not you accept them, show how I work, share my experience, and then leave it to you to adapt all of it to your own work without losing your essence.

There is also a hypocrisy worth naming here. The very people who criticize their own country for imposing its will on other nations then go on to do exactly the same, telling another nation how its people ought to train, regulate, and live with their dogs, as if there were a single standard way to approach every context and reality across different countries. Just try to trace where all this hatred and all these demands actually come from.

Sixth, and final, my work is for practitioners in the real world. It’s open to everyone, and the best peer reviewers or scrutineers of my practical work are the families I work with every day, the students I support inside and outside academia, my colleagues, and everyone who comes without condescension, without immaturity, without the need of bullying, destroying, or living in memeland, and without the kind of circular requirements that no answer could ever satisfy.

This is my final word on the topic. You’re free to share this post whenever you see my name used for misquotation, defamation, or false accusation. Leave them up, so that everyone can see for themselves how full the dog world is of self-centered actors who have lost their elegance, their humanity, their humility, and the value of the commendable projects they once had. Some of them I’ve blocked, for the simple reason that I can’t take in any more of the hatred in their hearts, and I refuse to keep witnessing it. But my email is always open to anyone with a question I can answer, the old-fashioned way, far more reliable than leaning on AI and all the idiocracy built around it, which, again, is being compiled in a folder for when the time comes.

That’s the independence I have, and depending on how we define it, there’s always a price to pay, and more projects for audiences willing to challenge themselves are coming as soon as this chapter closes with my series. In the end, it can all be summed up to choice. Be the owner of your choices and the slave of their consequences. Nosce te ipsum.

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