Goodbye to a Friend
Goodbye to a Friend A decade ago, a family invited us into their home. They already loved their dog deeply, recently born, and they wanted to understand him better, to know what he was telling them and why he did what he did. They gave us the chance to share our experience with them, and we have been grateful for it ever since. His name was Sofus. Over those visits, he became part of our lives too. He was patient with us while we got to know him, and every time we left that house, we knew him a little better. Over the years, we kept in contact on several occasions, and we knew how happy he was and how he shared that happiness with everyone. It reminds me of a passage in The Little Prince, where a fox asks the prince to tame him and explains that taming means creating ties. When the prince has to leave, the fox says he will cry, and the prince tells him he has gained nothing from it. The fox answers that he has gained the color of the wheat, because the golden fields will always remind him of the boy’s hair. Without our noticing, Sofus tamed us in the same way. We came to share what we knew with his family, and we left tied to him. That is why it hurts now, and it is also why so many ordinary things will keep bringing him back to us. When it came time to choose the cover for the last book in my series, I chose a photograph with him. The series began years ago because of my experience with dogs and the families who live beside them, and it feels right that it closes with him. Every time I pick up that book, I see him. Last week, at 11 years old, Sofus left us. He spent his whole life surrounded by people who loved him, and he loved them back with everything he had. Every one of them was lucky to know him, and we count ourselves among them. Our thoughts are with them. Goodbye, Sofus, and thank you for everything. Comments are not enabled on posts. To discuss an author’s post, you can reply directly to the email you receive if you are subscribed, or contact the author directly by clicking here.
And A New Stage Begins
And A New Stage Begins I’m pleased to announce that the International Interspecies Studies community is officially in early access! The project began as a case-study series, then grew into something much broader. Around the same time, I went to an event, spoke with many trainers, and saw firsthand how far the real conversations and the virtual ones have drifted apart. I heard how people in the dog world are feeling right now, and I came close to stepping back completely, staying here quietly, and leaving social media and public appearance. Many of us in this field, myself included, pass through three stages when things become too much. First, getting upset; then sad and low about almost everything around us; and finally, simply tired. Those conversations showed me how many people had reached that third stage, exhausted by the noise surrounding the work that no longer is professional or about dogs. If you scroll this personal social feed, you’ll realize that I wrote too much about it, repeating myself sometimes, something I don’t like, and I reached my limit, closing that stage with the last book of my Anthrozoology & Animal Training series. Most of that noise starts with the question of which side you are on, and once someone is placed in a camp, everything they say afterward gets read through it, so a question about a dog turns into a test of loyalty before anyone has looked at the dog. Sometimes, people ask me where I stand, and my answer is nowhere. Some find that frustrating, since a camp would tell them what I think without the trouble of reading what I actually wrote or understanding my approach in the field, as I already had to write about some false claims, and the answer has nothing to do with a lack of principles. I don’t need labels to dictate and limit my work. I am committed to animal welfare and to evidence. I know my ethical and technical limits, and I take responsibility for the consequences of every decision I make with the other species. I refuse, therefore, to declare an obedience first and examine the question afterward. Another thing I heard again and again among trainers was confusion about the word “science” and how it applies to dog training. Many people picture it as distant and complicated, and in one sense it is, because it is a process with more questions than answers and it offers none of the certainty that circulates so freely in this field. I believe in and respect the work of scientists who decline activism and the spotlight, and I believe everyone on the scientific side of this field should clarify and guide professionals on some subjects, making complex issues simple enough for any practitioner to understand, because what we are all attempting is communication with another species. I enjoy taking a principle, testing it in practice, changing what needs changing, questioning how things have always been done when there is reason to, and then presenting it for discussion. On a real case, that means examining the category before “prescribing” anything, so I want to know what the dog is actually doing, what is driving it, which part of the behavior an intervention is meant to change, and how we would recognize that it had failed. I also want to know what kind of life a dog has once its behavior has been managed, because preventing a behavior and improving a dog’s life are separate achievements. Working with a dog involves many solitary decisions, and when a case goes badly, the current demanding and judgmental climate we work in puts so much pressure on practitioners that it leaves no room for error, and this is also the reason why this community exists. We are keeping it small on purpose, a private space where anyone can bring a difficult question or one of the mistakes we all make without fear of judgment, and where “I don’t know yet” is accepted as an answer, often the most useful one available. I make those mistakes every day, because I am always trying new things. We’ll bring courses, webinars, live sessions, and much other material and information to share with you. To complement it, much of what will happen there will also come from the members themselves, from their cases, their questions, their discussions, suggestions, and requests. We will not dictate what anyone should know, and I have no wish to change people or tell them who they ought to be. We will show how we reason through a case, the science behind it according to the literature, and what we actually do in practice, saying openly where we are still unsure, and leave the decision with the person who has to make it, since each of us owns our choices and the consequences that follow. If the culture of this field changes, I want it to change by example, with people reasoning from different perspectives, seeing another way of working for themselves without losing their essence, with nothing imposed on anyone, since knowledge should strengthen a person’s judgment and responsibility, and never stand in for it. The people joining now, during early access, are the founding members, and the community will carry their mark long after the official launch. A small community takes its character from its first members, from the cases they are willing to bring, the questions they dare to ask, the self-moderation, and the way they treat each other when someone gets something wrong, and everyone who arrives later inherits that. Founding members come in while decisions about what gets built are still open, so their requests and their work will decide much of what this place becomes. Their membership year only starts counting from the official launch, and they keep the introductory rate for as long as they stay. A founding member mark will remain beside their names as a record of having been here at the start. I find it
In Our Own Words
In Our Own Words This spring, I sat down with Sheree Ann Kratmann Indiongco, along with Tilde Detz Jensen, etologi.dk, for a conversation about what our work actually looks like from the inside, the animals in our own lives, and the questions we carry with us every day. Tilde has spent over two decades working with and guiding families and their dogs, horses, cats, and guinea pigs, and she has a precise way of seeing what is really going on between a person and another species. Working alongside her keeps me honest, helps me appreciate nature and the simplicity of life, and our collaboration over the past decade has been insightful. The piece came out this July with Sining at Kultura International. You can read the article here and listen to the podcast here. Comments are not enabled on posts. To discuss an author’s post, you can reply directly to the email you receive if you are subscribed, or contact the author directly by clicking here.
Are we reinventing the wheel?
Are we reinventing the wheel? Xenophon told the huntsman to feed his hounds himself, and to do it while they were hungry, since a hound fed casually does not know to whom the food is due, while one fed in need “loves the giver” (Xenophon, trans. 1925, §7.12). Hutchinson (1848/1865) taught the down by throwing “a small piece of toast or meat” while giving the word, and held that “caresses and substantial rewards” are “far greater incentives to exertion than any fears of punishment.” The same book describes cavalry horses whose feeding time was announced by a pistol shot, which “soon changes a young horse’s first dread of the report into eager, joyous, expectation.” Counter-conditioning, in working detail, half a century before Pavlov published. Hammond (1882) built a whole curriculum around food and called it “Training vs. Breaking,” though he kept the whip for willful disobedience once training was finished. Bugelski (1938) found rats still responding in extinction for as long as the click of the food magazine sounded. Keller and Marian Breland founded Animal Behavior Enterprises in 1943, named the bridging stimulus in the mid-1940s, and were teaching operant conditioning to dog trainers from 1944 (Bailey & Gillaspy, 2005). Skinner (1951) then published the entire procedure in Scientific American, using a toy metal cricket paired with food, preferring it to a whistle because of the breath needed before blowing. Karen Pryor dates clicker training to two presentations in May 1992 and credits Skinner and Keller Breland. She never claimed the invention. Others have claimed it for her, and for themselves. These are only a few of the published sources on these topics, but they apply to many other “innovations” these days if we search for them. I would risk saying that even before any of these texts existed, someone had already applied them. Presentism cuts in both directions when we go looking for those people, because reading an older practitioner as a modern colleague grants him a framework he never had, and filing him away as pre-scientific discards a working knowledge that cost a lifetime with animals to acquire. Neither reading is dishonest, and both are the ordinary difficulty of looking backward with only today’s vocabulary to hand. What has changed is the incentive to claim. Work now reaches people through channels that need novelty and are indifferent to continuity, and an idea offered as an improvement of something already known goes nowhere. The current paradigm asks for a discovery, a method, a name, a degree of grandiosity that nobody would sustain after a quick search about it. The cost extends beyond historical accuracy, as something quieter goes missing when work with a living animal is packaged for distribution, and the person doing it has to become larger than the work to be seen at all. “Novelty” in dog training is close to a category error. Every generation believes it has surpassed the last, but the dog has not read the latest book or attended a specific seminar. Renaming something does not mean replacing it, and if anything had radically changed in kind rather than degree, the argument would be about the dog. It rarely is. Which leaves an uncomfortable question for anyone who teaches, writes, or posts: Can a field still transmit knowledge that makes no one famous? References Bailey, R. E., & Gillaspy, J. A. (2005). Operant psychology goes to the fair: Marian and Keller Breland in the popular press, 1947–1966. The Behavior Analyst, 28(2), 143–159. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03392110 (PDF: https://ivh.ku.dk/research-files/celat/Bailey_OpCondgotofair.pdf) Bugelski, R. (1938). Extinction with and without sub-goal reinforcement. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 26, 121–134. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0057091 Hammond, S. T. (1882). Practical dog training; or, Training vs. breaking. Forest and Stream Publishing. https://archive.org/details/practicaldogtrai00hammrich Hutchinson, W. N. (1865). Dog breaking: The most expeditious, certain, and easy method (4th ed., rev. and enl.). John Murray. (Original work published 1848) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/47808 Skinner, B. F. (1951). How to teach animals. Scientific American, 185(6), 26–29. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-teach-animals/ (PDF: https://appstate.edu/~steelekm/classes/psy3214/Documents/Skinner1951.pdf) Xenophon. (1925). On hunting (E. C. Marchant, Trans.). Harvard University Press. (Original work c. 400–350 BC) https://topostext.org/work/796 Comments are not enabled on posts. To discuss an author’s post, you can reply directly to the email you receive if you are subscribed, or contact the author directly by clicking here.
IACP Science Summit 2026
IACP Science Summit 2026 I was present on August 17th at the International Association of Canine Professionals Science Summit in California, presenting “Applied Fundamentals of Signal Precision in Interspecies Communication” to show the processes that occur before a behavior or its consequence and to highlight how important this stage is in practice for sending clear information to other species. It was also an important moment for me, since I announced my final book series, “Interspecies Communication,” which closes a long chapter of my career and marks the beginning of a new joint project with Borderland Barks and etologi.dk, called “International Interspecies Studies,” a community you can read more about here: https://etologi.dk/iis/ Thank you very much for the invitation, for the opportunity to share my work, and for the kindness and welcome I received from all of you. Meeting colleagues and friends in person again, and others for the first time, sharing experience, disagreement, and different perspectives, and learning from each other, is what makes events of this kind necessary in the industry. They stand apart from the turbulent noise of social media, where everything is conflated and extrapolated to a point sometimes devoid of any trace of humanity, and offer hope that change begins in each of us, away from a keyboard or a prompt, in how we look at reality and, hopefully, in the attitude we bring to it. Comments are not enabled on posts. To discuss an author’s post, you can reply directly to the email you receive if you are subscribed, or contact the author directly by clicking here.
Nothing Left to Prove
Nothing Left to Prove You don’t have to prove anything to anyone. Period. I write this as the last series of my last book moves toward release and several stages of a career close with it, this one above all. In the Study Center menu of the website (etologi.dk), for instance, a few of the next steps are already there for anyone who wants to follow where the work goes. I’m sharing what might be my final public words on this, as I prepare the last of my time and energy on the subject for the round table in LA in 10 days, for anyone who wishes to discuss this in person. I already wrote enough about it, and you can read it in my books and social feed. Something got lost along the way, and social media manipulation has a peculiar way of doing it. We were given a square that looks like the whole world and behaves like a very small place, but inside it, the loudest position starts to feel like the true one, and the number under a post starts to feel like evidence. Outside it, there’s a forgotten detail that every country still has its own culture, its own law, its own history with animals, its own limit on what may be done to a body that cannot consent. For instance, what certain trainers do in the United States, filmed and applauded by an audience that will never meet that dog and context, would put them in front of the authorities in my country within days, and the rest would be paperwork, possibly jail time, and a flight home. Anyone who forces one correct way for the whole world is telling you the size of their own. The same limit shows the people who applaud when someone is being mocked or satirized and canceled, and then object when the identical machinery turns toward a person they like. What they endorsed was the method and principle of it, and they do not care whom it is pointed at. Once it is available, it is available to everyone, and it will eventually be used against them one day by somebody who learned it from watching them. They will have no argument left, because the argument was given away the first time it was convenient to give it away. Long texts I’m aware I write, and easily accused of, the ones every professional in this field should have worked through at least once instead of trying to diminish them, are being set aside under the excuse that they are too complex. Complexity became a polite name for effort or personal challenge. What takes their place is short, fast, and supported by systems that count attention and nothing else. Cruelty performs very well under that arithmetic, and so it is reinforced, again and again, by people who would never describe themselves as cruel. We recognize a few of the words, actions, feel something, lose the middle, and never reach the whole those words came from. And there we are, staring into the abyss with our arms crossed, in full delivery, calling it a method, a way, a result. No serious activity puts its subjects on weird reality shows to feed an algorithm. Nobody films a patient at the worst moment of their life and sells the failure as entertainment, and if anyone tried, the profession would close around them, and that would be the end of it. Dogs get exactly that treatment, simple marketing objects, and the footage circulates afterward as if it were education. Here in Denmark, it would not be accepted by society, and the refusal would be quiet (or not) and total, which is the only kind that changes anything. What are you supporting because it looks right from where you happen to be standing, and how would the same thing look from anywhere else? How ready for change is someone whose first reaction to a request for more study and more rigor is to attack the person making it? If the work you spend your time criticizing is the same work you claim to defend, there is very little left to discuss, and nothing left to teach. The part nobody counts is the influence itself. Everyone influences someone. Every share, every laugh at another person’s expense, every silence in front of something you knew was wrong, teaches whoever is watching what is permitted. You are making other people while you do it, and while you make them, you are becoming something yourself. Choose your path. If your days are better spent being inventive in contempt, get better at the joke instead of the argument, putting that talent into hate and calling it criticism, be my guest, and please do not follow me. More than two decades in this field always went the other way. The fight was against the comfort of moral certainty, against the idea that believing something sincerely is the same as having tested it, and the testing was done in the real world, on every process and every idea I could put my hands on, my own procedures first and hardest. They still go out to students and trainers in several countries, and I still ask for the feedback, knowing that some of it comes back as the answer I did not want. That is the price of the thing being a profession at all, or trying to make a lost field into something more professional and respectful, not an ego-centered satire. What do you want? A professional profession, or a place to impose your beliefs? The choice is yours, of course. Mine was made a long time ago, and now, with one more chapter closing, I put the same demand back on myself and return to an older one that was left open and still updated as ever. Are you in? Image from the post: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Parable of the Blind, 1568. Six men held together by
Paper: Reactivity in Dogs- A Critical Review
Paper: Reactivity in Dogs- A Critical Review I’m pleased to share my published paper: “Reactivity” in Dogs: A Critical Review of a Spreading Label and a Proposed Ethological Reconstruction. It’s the result of several years of independent research and real personal investment. It is also a long and comprehensive review, so I’d ask you to give it the time it needs before forming a view. The proposal of this paper is simply to open a necessary deep discussion on this topic, expand critical thinking around the “reactivity” label, and prevent more reification in academia. The paper is available completely for free. You can read it by clicking the link below, and please be sure to click on the “PDF” icon to access the full document. Link: https://doi.org/10.19044/esj.2026.v22n21p1 Comments are not enabled on posts. To discuss an author’s post, you can reply directly to the email you receive if you are subscribed, or contact the author directly by clicking here.
The False Simplicity of a Dichotomy
The False Simplicity of a Dichotomy A useful way to understand behavior can be approached at nearly any depth, and usually, no one intentionally chooses the level. Instead, it naturally settles into habits, based on what the audience appears to prefer and what the person can easily access without strain. That last one is more important than it looks. Whatever range you end up having with an idea comes out of the tangled version you sat with before you ever said it cleanly. Someone who has been all the way through that and then cut it down to a plain sentence is carrying the whole climb inside the sentence, though the sentence gives no sign of it. Now picture somebody repeating those exact words who never did any of the work. Out loud, in the moment, you cannot tell the two apart. The difference just sits there, costing nothing, until an awkward case shows up that the plain version was never fitted to, and only one of the speakers has anywhere left to stand. This is where a superficial understanding of the complicated does its damage, and the damage runs in the opposite direction from what people expect, as the worry is usually that plain language loses detail. Perhaps the more serious problem is that plain language built on an unfinished understanding loses the ability to notice when it is wrong, and a little of knowledge becomes more dangerous than no knowledge at all. Someone who has studied which features of a process are structural and which are incidental can make a description down and still feel the tug when a situation violates it. Someone who never studied the structural from the incidental has nothing to feel the tug with, making this simple account a substitute for having ever had it, and it fails silently, which is the worst way for anything to fail, because silence gets mistaken for result and success. There is a symmetrical trap on the other side, because a person can hold onto elaboration for its own sake, piling on qualifications and conditions until the account can no longer be pinned to any particular prediction, and this too passes for depth. It even flatters everyone involved, since it looks like rigor and feels like humility before a difficult subject. But an account hedged in enough directions has earned the same immunity the cheap simplifier has. Neither can be shown to be wrong, the elaborate version drowns the testable claim in claims, and the plain version never made one, and from the point of view of anyone trying to find out whether the practitioner actually knows what they are doing, the two are equivalent, because a claim that cannot be found wrong cannot be found right either. So the honest situation is not that one setting is virtuous and the other lazy, complex or ego-filling. Both settings can be earned, and both can be faked, and the fashion for treating plainness and technicality as if they were positions in a debate about character has done real harm, because it distracts from the only question that carries any weight, which is whether the understanding underneath is finished enough to survive being moved. A person who has knowledge of the complicated can go either way on demand, can compress the full version into something an owner can act on before dinner, and can unfold the plain version back into its structure if a colleague presses on it, and nothing is lost in either move because the same understanding is doing both. On the other side, a person without that knowledge may be confined to one, and the register they happen to be confined to tells you very little about how much they know. Whitehead’s line was to seek simplicity and then distrust it. Most readers take that as a warning against cutting corners, against dressing a thing up tidier than it really is, but there is a harder reading. The simplicity you arrive at was put there by you. The neatness is something you added when you described it. The thing never had a say. Forget that you were the one who put it there, and you slide into treating your own description as the way the world is actually built. That is where it goes wrong. We reduce something because reduction is what understanding produces, and then, holding the reduced form, we start to believe the thing itself was always that small. That belief is of course comfortable, and it is where questioning goes to stop. It also subtly shows how a whole field can convince itself that certain issues are resolved and straightforward, leaving it unprepared to recognize the one that remains unresolved. The practical implication is more like a warning about what to trust, that a straightforward account is only as valuable as the complex understanding behind it. If that understanding is limited, a simple explanation isn’t helpful, as it becomes a hazard passed to the listener and, ultimately, to the individual, who faces the results of the account without ever having been exposed to it. The listener cannot check, the nonhuman cannot check, and that is what makes the choice of depth a question of responsibility instead of style, and it is also why the cheapest and most dangerous thing a person can do is take the simplicity they reached for by default and mistake it for the kind that has to be earned. Comments are not enabled on posts. To discuss an author’s post, you can reply directly to the email you receive if you are subscribed, or contact the author directly by clicking here.
Reflection on Epistemic Tribalism
Reflection on Epistemic Tribalism You can witness the same scene on both sides and lose track of which is which. The same certainty, contempt, and attitude for an audience that reinforces it, and if you remove the banners, the vocabulary, and the moral argument each side recites, the intrinsic posture does not change. Claims get sorted by obedience now, accepted or refused by who said them and by whose side gains ground when they spread. But none of this is new. Only the speed is. Belonging kept our ancestors alive, and agreement with the group worked as a sign that you were safe inside it. Belief bought cohesion long before anyone asked it to be accurate. Psychologists have a plain name for the residue that survives in us: identity-protective cognition, the habit of reading evidence in whatever way keeps your standing in a group you care about. Around 2017, the phrase “tribal epistemology” began to circulate for the end state, where a thing counts as true because it helps your side and false because it embarrasses them. Training slid into this the moment a method turned into a badge of who you are. An argument against it arrives as an insult, and applause for it feels like proof you were right about yourself. The group already settled which evidence counts before anyone checked it. Some questions never get asked out loud; everyone understands, without being told, which conclusions they are allowed to reach, and the argument stops being about what is accurate and becomes about who belongs. In dog training, this has produced a conversation that is no longer about the dog, but about whose science carries more moral weight, whose method is purer, whose camp deserves to keep talking: “My punishment is better than yours”, “My reinforcement is more ethical than yours”. The platforms pay in attention, and attention flows to outrage and dries up around nuance, so the loudest and most certain voice wins the day by design. People settle into corners where nothing contradicts them, and the edges of every belief go hard. And because a following has become a living, a method hardens into ground that has to be defended. Around the ones who fight in the open, there is always a second group, quieter and harder to see, that never steps into the arena and never carries the risk, although indirectly they are there, and sometimes interact in a shy way to mark presence. They supply the heat. They reshare, they wink, they hand the mob its next target and keep their own hands clean, and they collect the audience the fighting throws off. Nature is full of this arrangement. Something always feeds on a conflict it did not enter. Animals that fight over something worth having rarely fight to the end. Most contests get settled by display, by threat and posture and signal, because tearing each other apart costs the winner nearly as much as the loser. The old hawk and dove models. Once both animals refuse to back down, the price of the fight eats the value of whatever they were fighting over, and the arithmetic turns negative for everyone still standing. Ritual exists to stop a conflict before it reaches that point. The screen deletes the cost. You can savage a colleague in front of thousands and walk away without a mark, so the restraint that keeps real animals alive never switches on. The mockery, the pile-on, the ridicule of a rival is a threat display with the brakes cut. It says this resource is mine, stay away from my business, my reputation, my name. And the animal that already occupies the ground is the one that fights hardest to keep it, which is why the cruelty runs deepest wherever a living feels threatened. Underneath much of it sits something older and simpler, the wish to be seen as the one who knows. Dominance display was always about status as much as any resource, and a public fight is a stage built for it. Almost nobody sees the size of their own shadow. A practitioner with an audience is a model whether they meant to become one or not, and people copy what the model does, not what the model says. Every act of contempt teaches contempt. You spend years reinforcing behavior in animals with patience and timing, then you go online and reinforce cruelty in people without noticing it is the same work run backward. The following you build begins to sound like you, and it comes back worse than you are, because a crowd always does. I always remember Nietzsche’s line about whoever fights monsters, how you should be aware of not becoming one, because when you stare long enough into an abyss, it stares back. Hate works as a reinforcer like anything else does, and feeding on it long enough changes the person. By the time you get aware of what you have turned into, the thing you built has a life of its own that you can hardly stop. You will have raised a legion that mirrors you, and it will not disband because you had a change of heart. It answers to the appetite you trained into it, not to your regret, and it does not leave. The abyss keeps what it takes. While all of this performs, the dog goes missing from its own story, the one the field claims to serve, and becomes a simple “means to our ends”, an incidental to a contest that was never designed to serve them, the least interesting “thing” in the argument. One reality, one context, one narrow set of conditions gets exported as universal law by people who never worked outside their own corner, and whoever pays for the bad prescription cannot say a word in their own defense. Owners feel it from the other side. Most of them only want to learn and do right by an animal they love, and they show up to find
A Final Statement on False Claims
A Final Statement on False Claims 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
