well you came off (to me at least) in your post like you were saying don't use gentle leaders, look what this world renowned behaviorist says. It came off (again to me) as disrespect for my opinion. Now I do not expect you to agree with my opinion, but rather than saying I don't like this...look at what this person with these credentials says...you should just state your opinion. Be very careful with differing opinion and advice to clients when you graduate vet school as the veterinary profession is a small world.
My point is that you will find lots of different opinions from many veterinarians on many subjects. That does not mean one is wrong and the other is right.
Haha, yes, I know quite well about differing opinions as I'll likely want to do a residency in nutrition with a little behavior consulting on the side, which are probably the two fields in veterinary medicine where the only thing that two nutritionists/behaviorists can agree on are what a third is doing wrong.
I've learned to just roll with it and keep one's ears and eyes open to all opinions, learn a little bit from everyone, and be able to find some common ground. But as I learned in both grad and vet school, consensus of opinion is not evidence and advanced degrees don't always make somebody right. So one must simply use common sense sometimes.
I've worked as a behavior consultant for several years and have fostered dozens of large and often very unmannered shelter dogs, so I not totally speaking from inexperience here. Clients have consistently praised my opinions as being moderate, informed, and tailored to an individual dog. No one size fits all. But one thing I don't like is violating one of my favorite sayings: first do no harm. I hope people understand that head halters have a very real danger to them. Any training tool (choke chains/slip collars, head halters, buckle collars, remote trainers/shock collars, prong/pinch collars, no pull harnesses, etc) has potential for harm as well as usefulness. But in the end, they are still just tools. A screwdriver should not do the job of a saw and vice versa, some from practicality and some for safety. I speak from experience that this is one of those times for safety.
I do apologize if you took my comments personally, but I sincerely care for the safety of the dog over the opinions of others, experts as they may be.
So back to the issue. Does putting a training tool (which is appropriate in
some cases for
some dogs) on an individual where there could be a real danger of harm if they jump up and get their neck tweaked? Sorry if you disagree, but my common sense says no. The risks outweigh the benefits and the aversive self correction of getting your head and necked whipped to the side following an attempted jump are much worse than say a prong collar or a remote trainer where they may feel a moment of discomfort, but no lasting harm. In addition, when we use self corrections for something like jumping, we're not teaching the dog what we want. It has no motivation for staying on the ground except avoiding getting its head whipped around, which is an aversive. So the owner/handler may mistakenly think, "Ah ha! Problem solved!" when in fact, the dog hasn't really learned anything except it hurts to jump up when it has a nylon leash thingy on its face.
A better learning environment is using marker/clicker training and marking the desired behavior so it learns that all four paws on the ground=a good thing! This is why a lot of trainers call training tools like head halters, prong collars, remote trainers, even leashes and collars, a crutch because they're not taking care of the underlying "problem" (well, it's not a problem to the dog, as they're getting unintentionally rewarded for jumping!).
