Canine Behavior · Force-Free Advocacy

Fifty Force-Free Success Videos That Balanced Trainers Insist Do Not Exist

The demand for video was never about video. It was about skill. Here are fifty of the videos, and what the demand for them actually reveals.

Man with his back turned to a wall of screens showing calm dogs on loose leashes, typing on his phone, illustrating the force-free dog training success videos balanced trainers say do not exist — The videos have been there the whole time. The people asking for them are not looking.

Spend ten minutes in the comments under any reactive-dog training video and you will see it happen. A dog who used to scream and lunge at other dogs walks past one on a loose leash, eats a piece of chicken, and checks in with the person holding the leash. Within minutes a balanced trainer shows up with the line they all seem to have memorized: “Show me a video of force-free training fixing real aggression. If it worked, there would be videos. There are none.”

I want to take that demand seriously for exactly as long as it deserves, which is about one paragraph. Then I want to talk about what the demand actually means, because for a long time I was the one making it.

Here is the paragraph. The videos exist. They have existed for years, there are thousands of them, and at the bottom of this article I have listed fifty, grouped by source. They cover leash reactivity, fear, resource guarding, reactivity toward people, reactivity toward livestock, multi-week documented progressions, unedited walks, and, notably, setbacks. That list is a sample, not a census. Anyone with a search bar could have found every one of them in an afternoon.

So the interesting question was never “where are the videos.” The interesting question is why people who could find them in five minutes keep insisting they do not exist.

The demand

The demand was never a question

A sincere question can be answered. This one cannot, and that is by design.

Watch what happens when a force-free trainer actually posts the video. The dog “was not really aggressive.” The clip is “edited.” That is “one dog, not proof.” The trigger “was too far away.” The trainer “is not you, so it does not count.” Send a two-week, unedited, day-by-day progression and you will be told you should have sent a “red zone” dog. Send a dog with a bite history and you will be told the clip does not show the bite. Every possible piece of evidence has been disqualified in advance. The goalposts are not on the field. They are on a truck, and the truck is moving.

Now watch the standard run the other direction. The same person will post forty-five seconds of a dog lunging at the end of a leash, a cut, and then the same dog standing motionless next to a handler holding a remote, and call that proof. No baseline. No follow-up. No idea what the dog looks like six months later or what she does the day the collar comes off. A standard that only ever points in one direction is not a standard. It is a debate tactic.

And the tactic does a specific job: it replaces the argument. When someone cannot explain the learning theory, cannot tell you what negative reinforcement does to a fearful dog’s nervous system, and cannot engage with the published research, “show me the video” is a way to sound rigorous while avoiding all of it. A peer-reviewed study cannot be waved off as edited. A video can.

The tell

What the demand actually reveals

This is the part that matters, and it is the reason I wrote this article.

The demand for videos is a tell. It tells you what the person asking does not know how to do.

Think about what it takes to change a reactive or aggressive dog without force. None of it is visible from the outside, and all of it is real work.

What force-free behavior change actually requires

Every one of these is a skill. Not one of them is a tool.

A functional assessment. Figuring out what the behavior is for: what predicts it, what it looks like as it builds, and what the dog gets out of it.
Reading canine body language early enough to matter. Catching the weight shift, the closed mouth, the hard stare, and the slow lip lick that show up seconds before the lunge, not the lunge itself.
Managing threshold in three dimensions at once. Distance, duration, and intensity, so the dog stays in a state where learning is even possible.
Timing and rate of reinforcement. A marker delivered in fractions of a second and a rate of reinforcement high enough to compete with a trigger.
Criteria and judgment. Knowing when to make it harder, and ending the session before the dog ends it for you.
A generalization plan. A dog who is fine in a park at forty feet is not fine on a sidewalk at eight.
Coaching the pet parent. Teaching a person to do all of it on a real walk, with traffic, while a loose dog appears from behind a parked car.

That is a profession. It takes education, a skill set, and years of practice, which is why the credentials exist.

Now think about what it takes to make a lunging dog go still with a shock collar. You press a button. With a prong collar, you yank. With a choke chain, you yank harder. A three-year-old can kick a dog and make it stop doing something. Nobody would call that child a professional, and nobody would call what happened training.

Pain works as a behavior suppressor for anyone with a hand or a thumb. It requires no education, no assessment, and no ability to read the dog.

It requires no understanding of why the behavior exists in the first place, either. That is exactly its appeal to trainers who lack the education, knowledge, skills, and ability to change behavior any other way. The tool stands in for the skill.

So listen carefully to what a trainer whose whole toolkit is aversive is actually saying when he tells you force-free “does not work on serious cases.” He is not describing the method. He is describing himself. “I cannot get results without pain” and “results cannot be gotten without pain” are two different sentences, and only the first one is true. The fifty videos below are fifty people showing you that the second one is false, and the research shows it at scale.

The dichotomy

If it works, it is aversive. If it is not aversive, it did not work.

This is the argument that ends the conversation, and every balanced trainer walks into it eventually.

Behavior does not change on its own. If a dog’s lunging decreases after a consequence is applied, that consequence functioned as positive punishment. That is not an opinion or an insult; it is the definition. If the dog starts working to avoid or turn off a stimulus, the stimulus is functioning as negative reinforcement, and negative reinforcement only works when the stimulus is something the dog wants to escape. Both mechanisms require the same thing: the experience has to be unpleasant enough, frightening enough, or painful enough to matter to the dog.

So when a trainer says “it is just a tap,” “it is just pressure,” or “it is only communication, the dog barely notices,” he has to choose. Either the tool is aversive, in which case it carries every welfare cost that comes with pain and fear, or it is not aversive, in which case it cannot be what changed the behavior. There is no third door. A stimulus the dog barely notices does not interrupt a dog in the grip of a fear response.

You do not get to keep the results and disown the mechanism.

And the mechanism is the whole problem. Reactivity and aggression are overwhelmingly emotional problems. They run on fear, anxiety, and frustration, not dominance and not stubbornness. Punishment suppresses the behavior and does nothing to the emotion underneath it, except make the trigger worse. The dog who was afraid of other dogs is still afraid, and now the sight of another dog also predicts a shock. That is how you manufacture the dog who “was fine until he bit with no warning.” The warnings were not gone. They were punished into silence, and silence is not calm. If you want the behavior gone for real, you have to change how the dog feels, and there is no button for that.

Why the videos look the way they do

Suppression films well. Behavior change films badly.

There is one more reason the “no videos” claim survives, and it is worth naming because it explains why the good videos look the way they do.

Suppression is dramatic. Before: a dog screaming at the end of a leash. After: a dog standing still. It fits in thirty seconds and it looks like a miracle, which is exactly why it sells.

Real behavior change is boring on camera. It looks like a dog eating chicken forty feet from another dog, glancing over, and looking back. Then it looks like the same thing at thirty-five feet. Progress is measured in feet and in weeks. The dog is not being silenced; he is learning that the thing that used to predict danger now predicts something good, and that kind of learning does not happen on a schedule that fits a highlight reel. It also includes bad days, because nervous systems have bad days, and an honest record shows them.

That is exactly what you will see in the list below. Read the titles. “Day 9 walk.” “Progress after seven days.” “Complete two-week progress review.” “Four weeks of positive-reinforcement progress.” “Working through a training setback.” “Real, unedited.” These are not before-and-after clips. They are longitudinal records of dogs getting better, with the boring parts and the setbacks left in. Find me a balanced trainer who posts the setbacks.

One last thing about video, because it cuts both ways. A camera can show you that a dog went quiet. It cannot show you what the dog feels, whether her cortisol is climbing, or whether her mood has shifted toward the pessimistic. That is why this debate was never going to be settled by clips. It is settled by convergent research, and the research is not close.

The research

What the evidence says, from more than one country and more than one method

The strongest thing you can say about the science here is not that one study found something. It is that different research groups, in different countries, using different methods, keep finding the same thing.

What the research actually shows

Controlled trials in the United Kingdom found that dogs trained with electronic collars were not trained any more effectively than dogs trained with rewards, and showed more behavioral signs of tension.¹ A follow-up trial found that reward-based training was the more efficient approach, with the reward-trained dogs responding to cues more quickly.² In Portugal, researchers measured salivary cortisol, coded stress behaviors, and ran a cognitive bias test on dogs from reward-based and aversive-based training schools. The aversive-trained dogs showed more stress during training, had higher cortisol afterward, and judged ambiguous situations more pessimistically in a test run outside the training context, meaning the effect on mood followed them home.³ A separate UK group using a matched-pair judgment bias design found the same pessimistic shift in dogs whose pet parents used two or more aversive methods.⁴

On the specific question of aggression, a survey of dogs presented to a veterinary behavior service in the United States found that confrontational methods such as hitting or kicking, alpha rolls, and growling at the dog elicited an aggressive response in a quarter or more of the dogs they were used on, with hitting or kicking triggering aggression in over 40 percent of cases. Rewards and non-confrontational methods elicited very few.⁵ That study is seventeen years old. A review of the literature reached the same conclusion: aversive methods carry welfare risks, and there is no evidence they are more effective.⁶ And the American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior’s 2021 position statement recommends reward-based methods for all dog training, including the treatment of behavior problems, and states plainly that aversive methods should not be used for behavior modification.⁷ The AVSAB board reaffirmed that position in 2025.

Survey data, controlled trials, physiology, cognition, and a professional consensus, across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Portugal. Same direction every time. The people demanding a video have not read any of it, and they do not want to, because a study cannot be dismissed as edited.

A word to the trainer

What I would say to the trainer who is still asking

I was a balanced trainer for decades. I used prong collars and e-collars, I told pet parents they were necessary for the hard cases, and I said the “show me the videos” line myself. So I am not writing this from a distance.

Here is what I would say to that trainer now. The fact that you cannot get results without pain is not information about the method. It is information about your training. The skills that make force-free behavior change work are real, they are learnable, and they are harder than pressing a button, which is the point. Learn them. Take the coursework. Read the science. Get certified through a body that requires you to demonstrate what you know, not just count the years you have been doing it. When you can change how a dog feels instead of just what she does, you will stop asking for videos, because you will be making them.

And to the pet parent reading this who has been told that pain is the only option for a dog like yours: it is not. It never was.

The videos

Fifty force-free success stories that supposedly do not exist

The videos below are publicly available and show trainers and pet parents working without shock, prong, or choke collars. They are grouped by source. The list is a sample, it is nowhere near exhaustive, and it was assembled in an afternoon.

Modern Dog Training: explicitly force-free cases

Happy Hounds: the documented force-free Louie progression

Eight videos following one dog, Louie, from his first unedited training walks through progress updates, troubleshooting, and threshold management.

Positive-reinforcement longitudinal cases

Two dogs, Moira and Chop, documented over weeks rather than minutes, setbacks included.

BAT and force-free behavior-modification cases

BAT, or Behavior Adjustment Training, is Grisha Stewart’s force-free protocol that uses distance and the dog’s own choices as the reinforcer instead of pressure.

Additional explicitly reward-based success cases

Fifty videos, and I stopped at fifty because the article had to end somewhere.

Common questions

What pet parents ask me about force-free training and the videos

Q.Are there really videos of force-free training working on aggressive and reactive dogs?

Yes, thousands of them. The fifty listed above are a sample gathered in a single afternoon. They include multi-week documented progressions, unedited walks, a resource guarding case, reactivity toward people and livestock, and setbacks worked through on camera. The claim that they do not exist survives only because the people making it do not look.

Q.Why do balanced trainers insist that force-free training does not work for serious cases?

Because it does not work for them, and they mistake that for a fact about the method. Changing a fearful or frustrated dog’s emotional response requires assessment, threshold management, precise timing, and a generalization plan, all of which take education and practice. Suppressing the behavior with pain requires none of that. A trainer whose skills stop at the collar will experience force-free work as impossible, because for him it is.

Q.Is an e-collar still aversive if it is set low or described as a tap?

If it changes behavior, yes. A stimulus only reduces a behavior through positive punishment, or drives avoidance through negative reinforcement, when the dog finds it unpleasant enough to work to avoid. A setting the dog barely notices cannot be responsible for stopping a lunge. Either the tool is aversive and the welfare costs apply, or it is not aversive and something else changed the behavior. There is no third option.

Q.My dog stopped reacting after a shock collar. Why is that a problem?

Because the fear that drove the reaction is still there. The dog has simply learned that showing it is dangerous. Suppression removes the warning signals, the growl, the stiffening, and the hard stare, without touching the emotion underneath, and that is the recipe for a dog who appears fine and then bites with no warning. It is also why the behavior so often returns weeks or months later, sometimes worse than before.

Q.How is leash reactivity treated without corrections?

Through management that stops the rehearsal, desensitization that keeps the dog below the intensity where learning shuts down, and counterconditioning that changes what the trigger predicts. Progress is measured as distance shrinking and reactions softening over weeks, with skills such as an easy turn-away and a check-in layered on top. The videos above show exactly this process, day by day.

Meet Your Certified Canine Behaviorist

Will Bangura, M.S., CAB-ICB

CBCC-KA, CPDT-KA, FDM, FFCP

Arizona’s only CAB-ICB Certified Canine Behaviorist through International Canine Behaviourists, and one of only three in the United States, with more than 35 years of experience working with severe aggression, fear, anxiety, reactivity, and complex canine behavior cases. Will holds a Master of Science in Psychology and is certified in Applied Ethology, a Certified Behavior Consultant Canine and Certified Professional Dog Trainer through the CCPDT, and a Fear Free Certified Professional.

By identifying the underlying causes of aggression, anxiety, and other behavior problems and improving emotional regulation, Will helps pet parents across Phoenix and the surrounding metro area build safer, calmer, and more predictable relationships with their dogs. He is the author of Sniff to Soothe and the host of the Dog Training Today podcast.

Read Full Biography

For your dog

If your dog is one of the dogs in these videos

If you have a dog who lunges, barks, growls, guards, or has bitten, and you have been told that a collar is the only answer, the work in these videos is the work I do every day with pet parents across the Phoenix metro area and, by video, across the country. Start with aggressive dog training in Phoenix if your dog has a bite history or is escalating, or read the science-based guide to fearful, anxious, and reactive dogs if the problem runs on fear.

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Have a dog you are worried about? Call (602) 769-1411.

References

Cooper, J. J., Cracknell, N., Hardiman, J., Wright, H., & Mills, D. (2014). The welfare consequences and efficacy of training pet dogs with remote electronic training collars in comparison to reward based training. PLOS ONE, 9(9), e102917. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0102917
China, L., Mills, D. S., & Cooper, J. J. (2020). Efficacy of dog training with and without remote electronic collars vs. a focus on positive reinforcement. Frontiers in Veterinary Science, 7, 508. https://doi.org/10.3389/fvets.2020.00508
Vieira de Castro, A. C., Fuchs, D., Morello, G. M., Pastur, S., de Sousa, L., & Olsson, I. A. S. (2020). Does training method matter? Evidence for the negative impact of aversive-based methods on companion dog welfare. PLOS ONE, 15(12), e0225023. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0225023
Casey, R. A., Naj-Oleari, M., Campbell, S., Mendl, M., & Blackwell, E. J. (2021). Dogs are more pessimistic if their owners use two or more aversive training methods. Scientific Reports, 11, 19023. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-97743-0
Herron, M. E., Shofer, F. S., & Reisner, I. R. (2009). Survey of the use and outcome of confrontational and non-confrontational training methods in client-owned dogs showing undesired behaviors. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 117(1–2), 47–54. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.applanim.2008.12.011
Ziv, G. (2017). The effects of using aversive training methods in dogs: A review. Journal of Veterinary Behavior, 19, 50–60. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jveb.2017.02.004
American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior. (2021). Position statement on humane dog training. https://avsab.org/resources/position-statements

This article is educational and is not a substitute for an individualized behavior assessment. Aggression and severe behavior cases can involve safety risk and are best addressed with a qualified professional.