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"I can't stand this proliferation of paperwork. It's useless to fight the forms. You have to kill the people who produce them" Vladimir Kabaidze (General Director of the Ivanvoe Machine Works near Moscow, in a speech to the Communist Party Conference. That saying has been on my office bulletin board for a few years, since I picked it up at a political gig in NM a few years ago. At the time I got it, I was receiving loads of FAXes every day. Today I get many fewer FAXes, but mucho email...like up to 1500 a day. I suppose that's why I have nearly 300 mail boxes into which they are automatically sorted... still makes for a long day (and I delete a LOT of them) and have a spam filter etc. But sometimes I look at that statement from ole Vladimir and wonder what would happen if his threat came true with the emailers... but on to dogs...(since this is a dog blog). As a trainer I am sometimes conflicted about the use of punishment. I read a dog blog from a woman in Boulder who is addicted to the clicker and the use of positive reinforcement. This came home to me the other day when in MN, I was playing with my Brother-in-law's German Shepard. She was playing keep away with me with one of her favorite things, a used coffee can (plastic). To get her to give it to me at one point he (My brother-in-law, the dog's owner) picked up a snow shovel. She gave it (thd coffee can) right up. He apparently used it (hit her with it, I'd say) to train her to stay out of the road (he lives on a country road where a car would not have an easy time missing a dog). She had good recall of that shovel and it got her attention each and every time he picked it up (and she never ventures toward the road). Even my blogger friend from Boulder speaks about a prior pooch that learned from an electric fence. She reminds her readers that this experience was prior to "her knowing what she knows now," (as if that would make a difference to the pooch). I once waxed philosophic comparing shock collars to water boards, suggesting that the threat of water boarding would make me more likely to talk, but then again, so would a chocolate chip cookie. I was taken to task by a nice lady who used a shock collar, not for the shock, but for the sound it makes. She asked me if I had ever been around bearded collies, to which I honestly reported that not only had I not been around them, I did not even know what they were. I looked them up and her pooch was stereotypical of the breed. I have another Brother-in-law that hunts with dogs and trains his labs himself... he tells me that he could not control his dog from a distance when the dog is on a bird without a shock collar. Bottom line is that I believe all actions have consequences...most (nearly all) of those consequences should be positive, but occasionally it may be necessary to introduce a negative consequence. It most likely will not be a snow shovel, but it may not be pleasant for he pooch. Now my email will go up some... where's ole Vladimir when you need him?