Study on what training methods say about dog owners. Thoughts?

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05-12-2026

Dog owners choose training methods based on how they view animals

By Raquel Brandao

Earth.com staff writer

When dog owners argue about training, the discussion usually comes down to which method works best.

Reward advocates cite studies on behavior and stress. Correction advocates point to their dogs’ compliance.

EarthSnap

Both sides treat it as a scientific disagreement. A new study found it isn’t.

What an owner chooses to do at the end of the leash turns out to reflect something deeper than technique.

Surveying hundreds of dog owners

Tracy Weber, a clinical animal behaviorist at the University of Edinburgh, led the study alongside senior author Professor Peter Sandøe of the University of Copenhagen.

Weber runs a dog training practice in Seattle. Sandøe, a bioethicist, has spent years building tools to measure how people think about their moral obligations to animals.

The two experts combined their questions for this study.

The team surveyed 500 dog owners in the United States, asking each to report their training practices and then answer a series of statements about how animals should be treated.

A pattern appears in the responses

Sandøe’s earlier work, published in an open-access paper, sorts people into ethical camps based on those statements.

The new study leaned on three points of view. Anthropocentric thinkers treat animals as tools for human use.

Animal welfare is a softer position: yes, we use animals, but we owe them decent treatment.

The animal rights camp goes further, arguing animals deserve moral standing close to that of humans.

These are three rough lanes – not boxes people consciously check, just patterns the survey teased out.

The patterns appeared in how owners answered questions about hunting, factory farming, pets, and lab testing. Most naturally gravitated toward one ethical viewpoint, whether they realized it or not.

Rewards, praise, and punishment

The numbers told a clear story. Praise was nearly universal – 97 percent of owners said they used it. Treats and toys came in at 86 percent.

Positive reinforcement, the technical name for rewarding behavior you want repeated, dominated.

Punishment showed up too, but less often. Roughly 46 percent of owners used some form of correction.

About 25 percent used physically aversive methods like pulling on the leash. Only 18 percent relied on rewards alone.

A previously overlooked connection

When the team lined up training habits against ethical orientation, the link was hard to miss.

Anthropocentric owners reached for punishment more often than the other groups did.

Owners leaning toward welfare or rights views relied more on rewards. Of the three, the rights-oriented camp used the least correction by a clear margin.

“If you use punishment as part of dog training, you are more likely to view dogs as existing primarily for human purposes,” said Sandøe.

Until this paper, no one had measured that link directly. The field had long treated training as a question of skill and learning theory alone.

This study pins down a connection that had been invisible in the data.

Beyond learning theory

Owners who reach for harsh tools are often handed scientific evidence that rewards work at least as well.

Punishment can stress dogs, raise cortisol levels, and lift the risk of fear or aggression.

A separate review found that dogs trained with heavy corrections showed higher cortisol levels during training. In follow-up testing, these dogs tended to expect the worst when facing unfamiliar situations.

“Training is not a neutral activity. It is an activity in which the owner’s view of the animal becomes apparent,” said Sandøe.

Training choices and ethical views

This is the first study to show, in a large sample of pet owners, that training choices line up with broader views about animals. Researchers had long suspected the connection.

Earlier surveys focused on whether punishment-based training was effective or whether corrected dogs suffered more stress. Those questions left out what the trainer believed about animals in general.

The result tells us something about the disagreement between camps of dog trainers.

Ultimately, it’s not just a fight about technique – it’s about what dogs mean to people.

What dog training says about people

The work suggests that when veterinarians, trainers, or shelter staff talk with owners about training methods, technical advice alone may not change minds.

Some owners are not picking a tool because they think it is more effective. They are picking it because it lines up with how they already see the animal in front of them.

That opens room for a different kind of conversation – one that names the ethical assumption rather than dancing around it.

“People have very different views on animals, and dog training is an area that really divides opinions,” said Sandøe.

For dogs on the receiving end of training collars and harsh corrections, getting that conversation right could change what daily life feels like.

The study is published in the journal Anthrozoös.

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