By Driving home from Skinner Park in the West Loop early last June, Greg Cumber heard a sound that made him abruptly pull over. “It was the sound of an animal getting hit by a car, or like a child’s shriek,” he says. Looking around, he located the source of the cry–a small Newfoundland dog being led around the park by a tall African-American woman with a large remote control in one hand. Cumber, who had just been playing in the park with his German shepherd, Chloe, recognized it as the remote for an electronic training collar.
“I went up to Ami and I said, ‘Hey, your dog’s over there.’ She ignored that and started introducing herself to all of us as this great trainer and saying how she invented this training method, like she had forgotten all about the dog. I asked what was going on with the Bichon, and she said, really annoyed, ‘That dog has been nothing but a third tit on its owner, and I have to break it off and retrain it to be a dog.’ I just walked away, shocked.”
Moore bills herself as “Chicago’s Dog Whisperer.” The term doesn’t have a strict definition, but thanks to the rise of Cesar Millan and his National Geographic Channel show, it’s generally understood to mean a trainer who adapts theories about pack dynamics to communicate to the dog in a language it can instinctively understand. Moore’s handle was one of the reasons that in the winter of 2006, when I was working on a story about pit bulls for the Reader, I arranged to observe her as she trained an abused and aggressive dog at a shelter in Deerfield.
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Moore declined to discuss her methods, her training and education, or any certification she holds for this story and said she would advise colleagues and clients not to comment either. Stacy Goodman, a dog shelter volunteer whose own pit bulls were trained by Moore and who arranged for Moore to train the abused pit in Deerfield, did not return a call. Jim Morgan, a Chicago trainer who took a three-week private course in electronic-collar training with Moore in 2005, declined to comment about her.
Positive reinforcement is the opposite of correction-based training–also called negative reinforcement, compulsion, or aversion training, and until pretty recently the dominant school of dog-training philosophy. In this method the dog is punished for unwanted behaviors or for ignoring commands, the idea being that it won’t choose to repeat actions it associates with pain or discomfort. Choke chains and prong collars are common correctional tools, and so are electronic collars, though some trainers say they don’t use them that way.
Stacey Hawk is a Chicago trainer who teaches at three locations around town. Her specialty is agility, a sport in which owners coach their dogs through an obstacle course in a race against the clock. Hawk helped create the city’s first official dog park, Wiggly Field, and cochairs the Dog Advisory Work Group, a nonprofit that works to promote responsible urban dog ownership. She’s one of the city’s most outspoken advocates of positive reinforcement training. But she started her career in the early 90s using the Koehler method.
Goldberg speaks in a careful, calm voice that doesn’t vary when he interrupts our phone conversation to ask a dog to get off a counter. The electronic collar, he says, “touches an emotional chord in people, and it should. I am highly aware that I am wielding a tool that can easily be abused, or can be used to elevate training to an art form.” He’s of the opinion that it should not even be available to the public without instruction, and he’s turned away clients he thought might use it abusively. “I’m not going to give a powerful tool to someone who is unstable,” he says. “Some people enjoy the power trip, and they give the collar a bad name.”
