Interview With Dog Parent Coach and Author Angie Winters

For dog parenting coach Angie Winters, who has worked with and rehabilitated over 1,000 dogs, the answer is clear:

Training does not work for family dogs.

In her new book Don’t Train Your Dog: A Pet Parenting Guide to Teaching Good Behavior, Calming Fear, and Raising Happy Dogs, Winters—whose record for fixing dogs who were deemed unfixable by experts is unparalleled—explains that training simply cannot teach dogs the skills needed for modern family life.  Moreover, it causes most of the behavioral issues to develop in the first place.  Its failure causes dogs to lose their homes, families, and often their lives. This breaks Winter’s heart, fueling her drive to help dogs and their families.

For the heartbreak to end, dogs need us to drop the animal training mindset and instead communicate and teach from a parental perspective, Winters says. This means providing love, protection, and guidance rooted in an understanding of dogs' emotions and what drives them, their ability to understand us, how they are intertwined with us, and how they are similar to, yet different from, human children.

With this understanding, dog families can drop the treats only or harsh obedience approaches that only confuse dogs and frustrate humans and offer instead firm but supportive parental guidance that teaches the essential doggie rules and family life skills, fixes fears, and ends aggression toward other dogs.

In addition to explaining Winters’ approach in clear, relatable terms, Don’t Train Your Dog provides a set of simple guidance recipes for techniques that are neither too harsh nor too permissive and are easy for dog parents to use in their daily lives. These are also demonstrated in a series of videos that complement the book.

Winters has seen that the results—happy, well-behaved pups harmoniously integrated into family settings—play out every single time. 

You can learn more about Angie and her book here:
https://parenting4dogs.com/
https://www.facebook.com/angie.b.winters