Canine Behavior · Force-Free Advocacy

The Collar Trains the Trainer

Sixty-three scientific studies and sources. 169 organizations. Not one study for the other side. Here is why none of it reaches the people holding the remote.

Ask a balanced trainer for one study.

Not fifty. One. One peer-reviewed study showing that a shock collar, a prong collar, or a choke chain gets better or faster results than reward-based training without putting the dog’s welfare at risk. Not a study showing the collar can stop a behavior. Everyone knows it can. A study showing the three things the sales pitch depends on: more effective, more efficient, and no welfare cost the dog would otherwise have been spared.

There is not one. I have looked hard. I keep an evidence base of sixty-three scientific studies and sources on this question, and it is not a list of papers that agree with me. Seven of them are the sources balanced trainers cite in defense of the tools. I read every one. None of them shows those three things. The two controlled studies that tested the question head to head, using trainers nominated by the collar industry’s own trade body, found that the collar added nothing the same trainers could not get without it, and added stress the dogs did not need.

On the other side sit 169 organizations on five continents: veterinary associations, veterinary behavior specialists, welfare charities, the two bodies that accredit guide and assistance dog programs worldwide, trainer associations, schools, kennel clubs, a national veterinary authority. Every one of them is on record against pain-based training, with a document you can read. There is no comparable list on the other side. There is not a short list. There is nothing.

And none of it matters to the person holding the remote.

That is what this article is about. Not the evidence. The evidence has been settled for years. The puzzle is why the most thoroughly documented consensus this profession has ever produced bounces off the people it is aimed at, and why it bounces off for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the science. I know this from the inside. I spent decades on the other side of it, and I know exactly what the science was up against in me.

Here is the whole argument, in case you read nothing else.

The collar works on the dog. Everyone agrees on that. What almost nobody says out loud is that the collar also works on the trainer. Every press of the button that stops a dog cold is a consequence delivered to the trainer’s hand, instantly, in front of a client who has been struggling for months. The trainer’s behavior is being reinforced in exactly the way he thinks he is reinforcing the dog’s, and on the schedule that learning science identifies as the hardest to extinguish. The costs of the tool arrive on a different schedule entirely: later, spread out, easy to blame on the dog, and usually somewhere the trainer never sees. So he experiences a career of confirmation and never once experiences the harm as feedback. A person in that position does not need to be stupid or cruel to be unreachable. He only needs to be a mammal with a nervous system, which is the one thing he and the dog have in common.

That is the wall the science keeps hitting. It is not made of ignorance. It is made of reinforcement.

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The concession

Nobody says punishment does not work

Let me clear the straw man off the table, because balanced trainers love to fight it.

No credible force-free professional claims punishment cannot change behavior. Positive punishment decreases the behavior it follows. Negative reinforcement strengthens whatever behavior ends the discomfort. That is the first week of any course on operant conditioning, and it is exactly why the tools sell. A dog that lunges and gets shocked will often lunge less. A dog that pulls into a prong collar will often pull less. If the tools did not do this, nobody would buy them.

So whether it works was never the question. The question, the way any clinician in any field would ask it, is this: Was it necessary? Did it produce a better outcome than the safer alternative? What did it cost the patient? A surgeon who reaches for the riskier procedure when the safer one gets equal or better results is not being decisive. He is being negligent. Medicine, nursing, and pharmacology all live by that standard. Dog training is the profession that decided it did not have to.

Put the three questions to the collar.

Was it necessary? No. Cooper and colleagues (2014) took sixty-three pet dogs referred for recall and chasing problems, the exact problems the remote collar is sold for, and split them among trainers nominated by the Electronic Collar Manufacturers Association using the collar, the same trainers working without it, and reward-based trainers. The collar produced no better outcomes than the same trainers got with it switched off, and the collar dogs showed more stress during training: tense posture, yawning, panting. China, Mills, and Cooper (2020) went back to the data and asked the efficiency question directly. The reward-based group won: faster response to the sit cue, fewer signals needed, faster overall progress. The industry chose its own experts. Its own experts could not make the tool beat its absence.

Did it produce a better outcome? No. Ziv (2017) reviewed seventeen studies and found no evidence that positive punishment is more effective than positive reinforcement, and some evidence the reverse is true. Blackwell and colleagues (2012) surveyed 3,897 pet guardians in the United Kingdom; the people using electronic collars reported less training success, not more. Hiby, Rooney, and Bradshaw (2004) found reward-based methods associated with higher obedience and punishment associated with more problem behavior. That pattern has held for twenty years.

What did it cost? This is where the literature is deepest.

Not necessary. Not better. Not free.

And notice the shape of the defense you will hear next, because it collapses on contact. Either the tool is aversive, in which case it carries the costs above, or it is not aversive, in which case it is not what changed the behavior. Calling the shock a tap, a stim, or a communication does not create a third option. If the dog did not mind it, the dog would not stop.

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The evidence

What is actually on the list

I want to be exact about the number, because exactness is the point of this article and the other side will not be exact for me.

The evidence base is sixty-three scientific studies and sources. Thirty-nine are original studies. The rest are the reviews, the mechanism science, the foundational papers, and the papers the other side cites and argues over. All of them are listed in full at the end, and each one is profiled, with its design, findings, and limits, in the Studies Playbook on this site. They are not sixty-three independent studies reaching the same verdict, and I have never claimed they were.

I put those last ten on the list on purpose. Read them.

Salgirli and colleagues (2012) compared an electronic collar, a pinch collar, and a quitting signal in forty-two Belgian Malinois police dogs. No reward-based group. A study that ranks three aversive methods against each other cannot tell you whether any of them beats the alternative that has none. Steiss and colleagues (2007) measured cortisol in twenty-four kennel dogs wearing automatic bark collars: one blunt measure, not pet dogs, no trainer holding a remote. Schalke and colleagues (2007) tested electronic collars under different timing conditions, found welfare cost in every group, worst with poor timing, and concluded that because good timing cannot be guaranteed in real use, the collars should not be approved for general use. Proponents cite the sub-finding and skip the conclusion. Christiansen and colleagues (2001) followed 114 hunting dogs through sheep-aversion testing with welfare measures thin enough that the authors recommended the device only for preventing livestock attacks, paired with positive reinforcement. Tortora (1983) used a complex multi-stage protocol that opened with positive reinforcement, and his own third experiment found that simply shocking aggression produced only slight decreases. Lindsay (2005) is a textbook chapter: an author’s opinion, not a study.

Johnson and Wynne (2024) is the study balanced trainers had waited forty years for, and the one they wave at every argument. It compared methods for stopping dogs from chasing a lure and reported an efficacy result for the collar under its protocol. It has since been challenged in the peer-reviewed literature by Bastos, Warren, and Krupenye (2025), who disputed whether the design could support the conclusion drawn from it, and in my own methodological critique on SSRN (Bangura, 2025). The authors replied in 2025. In my reading, the concerns stand. Even taken at face value, the study shows narrow efficacy under one protocol, run by the people who designed it. It does not show necessity. It does not show welfare neutrality. It does not show that the collar beats reward-based training in anyone else’s hands.

So here is the honest accounting. Eighteen empirical studies of dogs, five reviews, six equipment papers, sixteen mechanism papers, and eight foundational and historical works converge on one conclusion from different countries, laboratories, dog populations, and methods. Against them: one contested study and six proponent sources, four of which do not even test the question. I did not hide them. I put them on the list.

That is what an evidence base looks like when someone is not afraid of it.

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The consensus

169 organizations, and the list on the other side

The organizations are listed in full at the end as well. Here is what that list is and is not, because I built it.

An organization is on it only where there is primary-source evidence of its position: a published position statement, a code of ethics or conduct, membership or certification rules that bind, a formal coalition endorsement, legislative support, or a curriculum that excludes aversive methods. Marketing words did not qualify. Positive, humane, and modern did not qualify. Organizations that permit shock, prong, or choke collars under any label, including the last-resort label, are not on it. The list is conservative on purpose. I want it to survive fact-checking by people who need it to be wrong.

Twenty of the 169 are veterinary and veterinary behavior bodies, and that alone should end the conversation. The Federation of Veterinarians of Europe, the Federation of European Companion Animal Veterinary Associations, the Federation of European Equine Veterinary Associations, and the World Small Animal Veterinary Association adopted a joint position in 2024 that backs positive-reinforcement training, opposes aversive techniques including electric pulse collars, and calls for regulation of training services. The American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior’s 2021 position finds no evidence that aversive methods are necessary for training or behavior modification and says they should not be used. The American Animal Hospital Association, the British Veterinary Association, the British Small Animal Veterinary Association, the Australian Veterinary Association, the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association, the New Zealand Veterinary Association, and the European Society of Veterinary Clinical Ethology each got there independently. And the American College of Veterinary Behaviorists, which board-certifies the specialists who treat the most severe aggression cases in this country, told the American Veterinary Medical Association in a December 2025 letter that its diplomates treat the most severe aggression, reactivity, anxiety, and predatory cases without aversive equipment. The claim that severe cases require these tools is answered by the people who treat the severest cases.

Seventeen are assistance, service, therapy, search, and working-dog organizations. Assistance Dogs International and the International Guide Dog Federation, the two global accrediting bodies, issued a joint position in 2023 stating that aversive, compulsive, punishment-based, or mixed training methods are not in the best interests of dogs or clients. Those are the organizations that produce dogs on whose reliability people’s lives depend. The claim that working dogs need the collar is answered by the working-dog sector.

Forty-six are professional training and behavior associations. Forty-six more are the schools and certification programs that train practitioners. Thirty-six are welfare, humane, and rescue organizations, the people who take in the dogs after the training has failed. Four are kennel, government, and legislative bodies, including Singapore’s national veterinary authority, whose 2025 advisory says rewards-based methods should always be considered first.

Now the other question. Where is the equivalent list on the other side?

I am not aware of a single veterinary association, veterinary behavior specialty body, guide-dog accrediting body, or national welfare organization anywhere in the world with a position supporting shock, prong, or choke collars. If one existed, the balanced world has had decades to produce it. What exists is a trade group, some trainer associations whose rules permit the tools, and the manufacturers. That is the roster. When a balanced trainer tells you the science supports what he does, ask him to name the organizations that agree with him. Then watch.

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The phenomenon

The wall

So that is the situation. On one side, the most convergent evidence base this profession has ever assembled and the unanimous position of every relevant expert body on earth. On the other, a few papers that do not hold, a trade group, and a great deal of confidence. If evidence decided this, it would have been decided in 2004.

Evidence does not decide it. Something else does, and I want to describe that something precisely, using the same science I use to explain a dog. It is the same science.

The collar trains the trainer

Watch what happens to the trainer, not the dog, the first time a remote collar works.

A dog that has blown off every recall for a year turns on a dime and comes running. The pet parent gasps. Something that has been a source of shame for months is fixed, visibly, in ninety seconds, by a person holding a small plastic box. That is a reinforcer. It is an immediate, salient, unmistakable consequence delivered to the trainer’s behavior of pressing the button, and it does to the trainer exactly what a piece of chicken does to a dog. The behavior that produced it gets stronger. Call it a dopamine hit if you like. Behavior analysis calls it reinforcement, and the name does not change what it does.

Look at how many reinforcers are stacked on that one moment. The unwanted behavior stops, which ends the trainer’s own discomfort in front of a watching client: negative reinforcement. The client is astonished and grateful: positive reinforcement. The client pays, refers a neighbor, leaves a review: more. The video goes up and ten thousand strangers say wow: more. Every one of these lands within seconds to hours of the button press, and immediacy is one of the most powerful variables there is in whether a consequence changes behavior. Nothing in the reward-based trainer’s day arrives that fast. The reinforcers for careful, sub-threshold, emotionally centered behavior modification are real, but they are weeks away, and they are quiet.

Now look at the schedule. The collar does not work every time. Some dogs do not stop, some clients are not impressed, some sessions go badly. So the trainer’s button pressing is reinforced intermittently, on a variable ratio, and any behavior analyst will tell you what that produces: high-rate, persistent behavior that is extraordinarily resistant to extinction. It is the schedule a slot machine runs on. A trainer whose pressing is reinforced on that schedule does not stop pressing because a study came out. He does not stop because a veterinary federation issued a paper. Those are not consequences of his behavior. They are words in a room he is not in.

I want to be very clear. I am not saying balanced trainers are stupid. I am saying their behavior is under the control of its consequences, which is the one thing about behavior everybody in this profession claims to believe. The trainer who tells a client that behavior is a function of its consequences, and then insists that his own choice of tools is pure reason, is making a claim about himself that he would never accept about a dog. The collar trained him. It trained him with impeccable timing, a rich schedule, and a decade of repetitions, and the training worked.

It worked so well that he calls it his professional judgment.

The costs arrive on a different schedule

If the harm showed up as fast as the compliance, this profession would have dropped the tools thirty years ago. It does not.

The compliance is immediate, visible, and credited to the tool. The costs are delayed, probabilistic, diffuse, and almost always credited to something else. The pessimism that Casey and Vieira de Castro measured does not announce itself in the session. It shows up as a dog who is a little flatter, a little less playful, a little less inclined to try things, months later, in a home the trainer no longer visits. The weaker attachment shows up as a dog who orients less to her people. The conditioned fear Schilder documented shows up as a dog who tenses when the collar comes out, and the trainer, if he notices, reads it as respect. The redirected bite comes six months after the last session and lands on a child, and the pet parent calls someone else, or the shelter, or the veterinarian for the last appointment. The trainer never hears about it. If he does, the explanation is already waiting: the dog was aggressive. That is why it needed the collar. The tool that produced the outcome is exonerated by the very problem it was hired to fix.

That is a broken feedback loop, and a broken feedback loop is the most reliable way there is to manufacture a confident expert who is wrong. Every trainer sees the dogs at the beginning, when the suppression is fresh and the pet parent is grateful. Almost none of them see the dogs at the end. The sample is biased in the one direction that makes the tool look flawless, and his certainty grows with every case, because the cases he sees all look like wins and the failures land on someone else’s caseload.

The specialists who take those referrals are not seeing a different population of dogs. They are seeing the same dogs, later.

Meanwhile his own learning history, thousands of button presses each followed by a dog going quiet, has taught him a lesson in the most durable way a lesson can be taught. Mowrer described the two-factor structure of avoidance learning in 1947, and it fits the human in the equation as neatly as the dog. The trainer has learned that the button ends the aversive situation of a dog behaving badly in front of a client, and he has learned to reach for it before that situation can fully develop. He avoids the discomfort of not knowing what else to do. The tool has become his safety signal. Cain (2019) and Sears and colleagues (2026) describe what happens to avoidance behavior practiced long enough: it becomes habitual, it shifts to a different brain system, and it stops responding to changes in the consequences that built it. That is a description of a rat in a shuttle box. It is also a description of a trainer with twenty years on the remote.

Confirmation bias is not a character flaw. It is what a reinforced belief looks like from the inside

Everything above happens before the trainer reads a study, and it decides what happens when he does.

A person whose behavior has been richly reinforced for a decade does not meet contrary evidence as information. He meets it as a threat, because accepting it would mean the thing he is good at, the thing he built his business and his reputation and his sense of himself on, has been hurting dogs for money the whole time. Nobody arrives at that conclusion casually. The predictable response, the one any psychologist would predict, is to reject the evidence, and rejection does not feel like rejection from the inside. It feels like scrutiny. It feels like being the one person in the room who is not fooled.

So the pattern runs like this, and if you have spent any time in these arguments you have seen it. Cooper (2014) is out because the cortisol difference was not significant, never mind that the behavioral stress measures were. China (2020) is out because it used the same data. The Portuguese studies are out because the dogs were Portuguese. Herron is out because it relied on guardian report. Casey is out because it was a survey. Schilder is out because they were working dogs. The reviews are out because they only review the studies just thrown out. Every study gets a different reason, and none of the reasons is ever applied to the studies the trainer likes. Salgirli had forty-two police dogs and no reward-based group, and it is proof. Steiss had twenty-four kennel dogs, and it is proof. Johnson and Wynne is contested in the peer-reviewed literature, and it is settled.

There is a tell, and it is the one I opened with. A person who is weighing evidence produces some. A person who is protecting a reinforcement history only ever subtracts. Ask for the study. Not the argument, not the anecdote, not the video of the happy dog running off leash, which shows a well-trained avoidance response doing exactly what avoidance responses do: the dog looks fine because the aversive is no longer being delivered. The study. Decades into this debate the balanced world has not produced one, because the study does not exist, because the finding does not exist.

The social environment makes all of this worse. Bandura showed in 1965 that we pick up behavior by watching models get reinforced for it, and the apprentice watches the mentor press the button, watches the dog stop, and watches the client pay. Nobody in that room is watching the dog’s cortisol. The seminars, the sponsorships, the trade group, the celebrity trainers, and the algorithm that rewards a dramatic before-and-after over a slow desensitization session are all reinforcing from the outside the same behavior the collar reinforces from the inside. Todd (2018), reviewing why humane methods fail to spread, named the lack of any regulation of dog trainers as a structural cause, and named something else that matters here: when professional bodies appear to disagree, the public concludes there is no consensus. There is a consensus. That is what the 169 organizations are for.

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The skill gap

Pressure is easy. Skill is not.

There is a quieter cost, and the trainer pays it.

Reaching for pressure is easy. It requires almost no understanding of why the dog is doing what she is doing, because it never engages with the why. It engages with the surface. A dog lunging at another dog is a dog experiencing fear, or frustration, or a learned expectation that lunging makes the other dog go away, and the collar addresses none of that. It addresses the lunge. The lunge stops, the fear stays, and now the fear has a new association: the appearance of another dog predicts pain in the neck. That is how harm compounds, and it is why aversive methods are most dangerous in the exact cases, reactivity and aggression, where balanced trainers insist they are most needed.

Resolving that same case without pressure asks a great deal. A functional assessment: what predicts the behavior, what it does for the dog, what keeps it going. Management that stops the dog rehearsing it while the work is done. Alternative behaviors, and a dog who can regulate her own arousal. Desensitization and counterconditioning below threshold, where the dog shows no outward distress at all, not merely no lunging, so the emotional response to the trigger actually changes instead of being suppressed. Reading canine body language at a level most people never reach. And a working grasp of the dog’s reinforcement history, genetics, development, medical picture, pain, sleep, diet, and environment, because behavior is the output of a whole animal and a whole life. A practitioner who is not thinking about the whole system is not treating the dog. He is silencing her.

That skill set takes years to build and a lifetime to sharpen. The trainer who relies on pressure never builds it, because he never has to. The tool absorbs the pressure to learn. Then, having never built the skill, he looks at a severe case and concludes it cannot be done without the collar, and he is right in one narrow sense: he cannot do it without the collar.

“Some dogs need aversives” is usually a statement about the trainer’s ceiling, dressed up as a statement about the dog.

When Blackwell and colleagues (2012) looked at who uses electronic collars, the predictors they found were characteristics of the pet guardian. The tool is chosen by the human. That is the real dividing line in this profession. The aversive-based trainer is interested primarily in results, with welfare as a secondary consideration to be minimized where convenient. The force-free professional puts welfare first. We want results too, and we get them, but not at the dog’s expense, and not results of the kind the collar produces. Suppressing the outward behavior is not the result we are after. Resolving the problem is. Those are different goals, they take different skills, and they produce different dogs.

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A crossover trainer

I know the wall from the inside

I have trained dogs for more than fifty years, thirty-six of them professionally, and for decades of that time I was a balanced trainer. I used the tools. I taught with them. I felt everything in this article from the inside: the hit when a dog that has defied everyone for a year turns and comes on the first press, the client’s face, the certainty. I built years of work on that certainty, and I told myself the same things about welfare that balanced trainers tell themselves now. I was not lying. I was reinforced, and I could not see it, because nobody can see the contingency they are standing inside.

Crossing over was not a moment of insight. It was a long, uncomfortable extinction. The old reinforcer was gone and the new one had not arrived, because the reinforcers for force-free work with serious cases come slowly, and they come from the dog, not the crowd. I had to become a much better trainer than I had been, and I had to sit with what I had done before I became one. I do not say this to be absolved. I say it because I have never seen a balanced trainer argued out of the tools, and I have seen many reinforced out: by the slow accumulation of dogs they could not help, by a case that went wrong in a way they could not explain away, by a veterinarian who stopped referring. The evidence was available to me for years before I could read it. That is the wall. I have stood on both sides of it.

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The call-out

Why I am calling this out

I am not writing this to be understanding. I am writing it because the situation is indefensible and the profession keeps defending it.

A pet parent who hires a balanced trainer is told, nearly every time, that the tools are safe, that the science supports them, that positive-only trainers are ideologues, and that the dog will be fine. Every one of those claims is false, and the person making them has no study to point to. The pet parent cannot know that. The pet parent is trusting a professional, and the professional is repeating what the collar taught him. The last-resort story does not survive the data either: when Masson and colleagues (2018b) surveyed 1,251 people in France, 71.8 percent of collar users had never had professional advice, three in four had tried two or fewer alternatives first, and 7 percent of the dogs had physical wounds. The dog, who cannot consent and cannot leave, pays the entire bill: the stress in the session, the pessimism outside it, the weakened bond, the higher odds of aggression, the pain in the neck that a dial setting calls mild. And when the bill comes due, the dog is blamed for it.

We have sixty-three scientific studies and sources. We have 169 organizations on five continents. We have twenty-seven jurisdictions that have legislated against these tools, sixteen years of Welsh regulatory experience, and no published peer-reviewed study attributing public-safety harm to any of those bans. We have the working-dog sector, the guide-dog sector, and the specialists who treat the worst aggression on earth all doing the work without pressure. And we have a marketplace in which none of it matters.

The marketplace is run by reinforcement, and reinforcement does not read.

That is why I no longer believe education alone will finish this. Education works on people who are open to evidence, and I have just spent several thousand words explaining why these people are not, through no failure of intelligence and no excess of malice, but because the tool got to them first. There is one thing a variable-ratio schedule cannot survive: the removal of the reinforcer. Take the remote out of the marketplace and the trainer’s hand has nothing to press. That is a law, not a lecture. It is why I work with the International Canine Legislative Action Committee, and why I ask every professional who believes in force-free training to do the same. The petition for a global ban on aversive training tools and methods is the first step.

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For pet parents

If you are a pet parent

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Common questions

What people ask me about the science and the trainers who ignore it

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The organizations

The professional and institutional consensus: 169 organizations

An organization appears here only where there is primary-source evidence of its position: a published position statement, a code of ethics or conduct, membership or certification rules, a formal coalition endorsement, legislative support, or a curriculum that excludes aversive methods. Marketing language such as positive, humane, or modern does not qualify on its own. Organizations that permit shock, prong, or choke collars, or intentional positive punishment, under any label, are not listed. A dagger (†) marks an organization listed by the Initiative for Force-Free Dog Training as a supporter of its position paper and code of conduct, as checked on September 15, 2026. Two entries are equine bodies and two are allied-practitioner bodies, and they are labeled as such.

Veterinary and veterinary behavior organizations (20)

1. American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior (AVSAB), United States
2. American College of Veterinary Behaviorists (ACVB), United States
3. American Animal Hospital Association (AAHA), United States
4. Australian Veterinary Association (AVA), Australia
5. Canadian Veterinary Medical Association (CVMA), Canada
6. British Small Animal Veterinary Association (BSAVA), United Kingdom
7. British Veterinary Association (BVA), United Kingdom
8. New Zealand Veterinary Association (NZVA), New Zealand
9. Singapore Veterinary Association (SVA), Singapore
10. European Society of Veterinary Clinical Ethology (ESVCE), Europe
11. Federation of Veterinarians of Europe (FVE), Europe
12. Federation of European Companion Animal Veterinary Associations (FECAVA), Europe
13. World Small Animal Veterinary Association (WSAVA), international
14. Federation of European Equine Veterinary Associations (FEEVA), Europe (equine)
15. Fear Free, United States, with international certification
16. Swiss Veterinary Society for Animal Protection (STVT), Switzerland †
17. Swiss Veterinary Society for Behavioural Medicine (STVV), Switzerland †
18. Certodog, Stiftung für das Wohl des Hundes, Switzerland †
19. Berufsverband der TierheilpraktikerInnen Schweiz (BTS), Switzerland (allied practitioners) †
20. EGCBT Schweiz, European Guild of Canine Bowen Therapists, Switzerland (allied practitioners) †

Professional dog training and behavior associations (46)

21. Association for Professional Dog Training International (APDT International), United States, international membership
22. Association of Pet Dog Trainers UK (APDT UK), United Kingdom
23. Association of Pet Dog Trainers Australia, Australia
24. Association of Pet Dog Trainers New Zealand (APDTNZ), New Zealand
25. Association of Pet Dog Trainers Ireland, Ireland
26. International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants (IAABC), United States, international membership
27. Animal Behaviour and Training Council (ABTC), United Kingdom
28. UK Dog Behaviour and Training Charter, United Kingdom
29. Initiative for Force-Free Dog Training (IFD), Switzerland, international reach
30. Pet Professional Guild (PPG), United States, international membership †
31. Pet Professional Guild Australia (PPGA), Australia
32. Institute of Modern Dog Trainers (IMDT), United Kingdom
33. International Canine Behaviourists (ICB), United Kingdom
34. Association of INTODogs, United Kingdom
35. COAPE Association of Pet Behaviourists and Trainers (CAPBT), United Kingdom
36. COAPE Association of Behaviourists and Trainers International (CABTi), international
37. International Companion Animal Network (ICAN), international
38. International Institute for Canine Ethics (IICE)
39. The Canine Behaviour and Training Society (TCBTS), United Kingdom
40. Professional Association of Canine Trainers (PACT), United Kingdom
41. Pet Professional Network (PPN)
42. Association of Pet Behaviour Counsellors (APBC), United Kingdom
43. Fellowship of Animal Behaviour Clinicians (FABC), United Kingdom
44. British and Irish Association of Zoos and Aquariums (BIAZA), United Kingdom and Ireland
45. Pet Dog Trainers of Europe (PDTE), Europe †
46. IBH, Internationaler Berufsverband der Hundetrainer/innen, Germany †
47. ÖBDH, Österreichischer Berufsverband der Hundeerzieher, -trainer und -verhaltensberater, Austria †
48. VDTT, Berufsverband der Tierverhaltensberater und -trainer, Germany †
49. VÖHT, Vereinigung Österreichischer HundeverhaltensTrainerInnen, Austria †
50. SVH StresstrainerInnen Hund †
51. SKG, Schweizerische Kynologische Gesellschaft, Switzerland †
52. Kennel Union of Southern Africa (KUSA), South Africa
53. Professional Dog Businesses UK, United Kingdom †
54. Force Free Oregon, United States †
55. Force Free Trainers of Wisconsin (FFTW), United States
56. Alliance of Force-Free Animal Professionals
57. Dog Scouts of America (DSA), United States
58. Dog Welfare Alliance
59. International Positive Dog Training Association (IPDTA)
60. Canadian Association of Professional Dog Trainers (CAPDT), Canada
61. Animal Behaviour Consultants of Southern Africa (ABCSA), South Africa
62. MFEC, Mouvement professionnel francophone des éducateurs de chiens de compagnie
63. SECEP, Syndicat des éducateurs comportementalistes en positif, France
64. Chien en Mouvement
65. Collectif Pausitif
66. Association of Animal-Assisted Intervention Professionals (AAAIP)

Dog training education, certification, and professional development (46)

67. Karen Pryor Academy (KPA), United States
68. The Academy for Dog Trainers, United States
69. Victoria Stilwell Academy / Positively, United States
70. Grisha Stewart Academy, United States
71. Science Matters Academy of Animal Behavior
72. Academy of Pet Careers, United States
73. Animal Training Academy
74. Canine Behavior College
75. Carefree Companion
76. Good Dog Academy
77. Peaceable Paws, United States
78. The Phenix Advocacy Center for +R Canine Professionals, United States
79. Understand Horses (equine)
80. Do No Harm Dog Training and Behavior
81. International School for Canine Psychology and Behaviour (ISCP), United Kingdom, international distance learning
82. College of Scent Dogs, United Kingdom
83. Puppy School, United Kingdom
84. Gundog Trainers Academy, United Kingdom
85. Natural Animal Centre (NAC)
86. The Dog Trainer School
87. Animal Centred Education (ACE), United Kingdom
88. Delta Institute, Australia
89. Nordic Education Centre for Dog Trainers, Nordic countries
90. Canis Hundeskole, Norway
91. GoodDog Norway / GoodDog Academy, Norway
92. BHARCS Academy of Canine Behaviour and Ethology, India
93. PUPP Institute
94. Animal Learn, Germany †
95. AggressiveDog, United States †
96. Clickerzentrum, Switzerland †
97. cumcane familiari, Switzerland †
98. Dog Academy Rakkaat Haukut / Dog Oriented Institute, Finland †
99. Dog-ibox †
100. Easy Dogs †
101. Hey Fiffi †
102. HundeUni, Science Meets Practice †
103. Hundeherz, Switzerland †
104. I.E.T. Institut für angewandte Ethologie und Tierpsychologie, Switzerland †
105. Leben mit Hunden †
106. Lernwelt Hund, Germany †
107. NF Footstep, Switzerland †
108. Proactive Animal Consulting †
109. Sprich Hund!, Germany †
110. SzTVT, Schulungszentrum für Tierverhaltenstherapie und Erziehungsberatung, Austria †
111. ZfTT Zentrum für Tiertherapeuten, Germany †
112. rundum.dog †

Animal welfare, humane, rescue, and advocacy organizations (36)

113. BC SPCA, Canada
114. Montreal SPCA, Canada
115. Toronto Humane Society, Canada
116. Ottawa Humane Society, Canada
117. Winnipeg Humane Society, Canada
118. Calgary Humane Society, Canada
119. Humane Canada, Canada
120. ASPCA, United States
121. Humane World for Animals (formerly the Humane Society of the United States), United States, international
122. American Humane Society, United States
123. Best Friends Animal Society, United States
124. Humane Society of Sonoma County, United States
125. RSPCA Australia, Australia
126. RSPCA South Australia, Australia
127. RSPCA Victoria, Australia
128. RSPCA New South Wales, Australia
129. RSPCA (England and Wales), United Kingdom
130. Scottish SPCA, Scotland
131. Blue Cross, United Kingdom
132. PDSA, United Kingdom
133. Dogs Trust, United Kingdom
134. Battersea Dogs and Cats Home, United Kingdom
135. SPCA New Zealand, New Zealand
136. SPCA Singapore, Singapore
137. SPCA Hong Kong, Hong Kong
138. Hong Kong Dog Rescue, Hong Kong
139. Cape of Good Hope SPCA, South Africa
140. FOUR PAWS International, international, headquartered in Austria
141. TIR, Stiftung für das Tier im Recht, Switzerland †
142. Kompanima, Switzerland †
143. Schaffhauser Tierschutz, Switzerland †
144. Susy Utzinger Stiftung für Tierschutz, Switzerland †
145. Stiftung TierRettungsDienst, Switzerland †
146. Zürcher Tierschutz, Switzerland †
147. Animal Rescue, Canton Schaffhausen and Thurgau, Switzerland †
148. DAS TIER + WIR, Stiftung für Ethik im Unterricht, Switzerland †

Assistance, service, therapy, search, and working-dog organizations (17)

149. Assistance Dogs International (ADI), international
150. International Guide Dog Federation (IGDF), international
151. Guide Dogs UK, United Kingdom
152. Guide Dogs Victoria, Australia
153. Guide Dogs Queensland, Australia
154. NEADS Service Dogs, United States
155. Atlas Assistance Dogs, United States
156. Dog A.I.D., Assistance in Disability, United Kingdom
157. Pet Partners, United States
158. Arbeitsgemeinschaft Mantrailing, Rescue and Therapy, Germany †
159. Search and Recovery Canine Network †
160. Mantrailing Basel, Switzerland †
161. Mantrailing Plus, Switzerland †
162. Ausbildungszentrum für tiergestützte Therapie im Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany †
163. Fellverliebt, Training Centre for Therapy Dog Teams †
164. Helferhund, Switzerland †
165. TellingtonTTouch Interessens- und Berufsverband Schweiz, Switzerland †

Legislative, government, and kennel bodies (4)

166. International Canine Legislative Action Committee (ICLAC), international
167. The Royal Kennel Club, United Kingdom
168. Animal and Veterinary Service / National Parks Board, Singapore
169. Norsk Kennel Klub (NKK), Norway

Meet Your Certified Canine Behaviorist

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.

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