Will Atherton is one of the most intentional, thoughtful people I’ve met. As one of the world’s most effective and best-known dog behaviorists, Will understands that people look to him for advice, and he takes that very seriously.
You won’t hear him speak ill of fellow behaviorists or bad-mouth different methodologies, because he understands that dog training has a wide spectrum of successful approaches.
He wants to bridge some of the divisions between practitioners of different methodologies because, above all else, Will is about action. He quite rightly points out that all our theoretical conversations and debates on emotional topics don’t help the owner or the dog, which are the only truly important metrics of success.
Will believes that training is extremely tailored to not only the dog, but the skill, time, living environment, and patience of the owner.
Based in Derbyshire, UK, Will’s success in sharing his knowledge via easy-to-digest video content has led to over 3 million followers on his social platforms, but it was his brutally raw documentary, Unconditional, that led to our chat. In his video, Will discusses how his Labrador, Sully helped him out of a severe bout of mental illness by forcing his focus on the happiness of others and by helping Will focus on the loving leadership of dogs.
Greg: I’d like to lead by saying that your documentary was spectacular. From a lifetime anxiety sufferer, thank you for sharing your struggle, It’s both brave and inspiring. Before we dig too deep, who is in your pack?
Will: Thanks! Yes, we’ve got three dogs now; Sully, my Labrador, Eileen, my English Mastiff, and Puppy, who is an interesting mix of breeds with quite the backstory. I bonded with her while volunteering at a shelter that I work with.
Puppy was her foster name because she just was the puppy, and since the plan was adoption, we never picked a different name. Fast forward three years, and surprise, she stayed with us! Despite being a very large Mastiff, the name Puppy stuck.
That's my three dogs, a combination of rescues and puppies from established breeders.
Greg: Sounds like a beautiful pack. You mentioned breeders, which can be divisive. We’ve never been anti-breeders because responsible breeders are needed. In the US though, people get passionate about avoiding breeders.
The US euthanizes about 20 times the number of healthy dogs per capita as the UK. That’s just one example of a cultural difference in two otherwise similar dog communities.
Responsible Breeding
Will: That’s interesting. Since the largest percentage of my audience is American, I must make sure that I can speak to their needs while living here and working with dogs in the UK. In doing that, I’ve seen some of those little differences too. But I don't make any blanket statements because there are great breeders.
I always point them to my English mastiffs. I work with Womlu Mastiffs as a gold standard for responsible breeding. I have never encountered better breeders of any breed in any country in my life. I would fully endorse what they do, how they source their owners, and the ongoing, lifelong support that they provide.
So breeding isn't a problem. It's the type of people that are drawn to it. I imagine it's not too dissimilar to the gun debates you have in the US.
Greg: Exactly, It’s an entitlement thing. We seem to feel entitled to own and breed dogs without rules. It’s purely anecdotal, but in countries where people comply with sensible licensing and education programs, stray dogs rarely exist. In Germany, for example, euthanasia is rare outside of medical/quality-of-life situations.
Different countries have solved it, but in those like America, everybody feels entitled to own or even breed a dog. Where breeder licenses are easy to acquire, and rarely enforced, it becomes attractive to ‘produce’ dogs and collect the money.
All that said, I don't think good breeders want backyard breeders or otherwise ethically questionable breeding any more than we do.
Will: Definitely not. They get tarnished with the same brush. It's the same in the training industry. Within systems of training, there are practitioners who are excellent and those who are poor. You can be an excellent practitioner of a system of training and get tarnished with the brush of somebody doing it poorly, as with any industry.
Navigating the Different Dog Training Ideologies
Greg: My simplified take on training is that you've got ‘carrots’ and ‘sticks’, and people argue about the size of the ‘carrots’ and the ‘sticks’ and when to use them.
People argue for their training methods from strong aversion-based practices to aversion-free methods. In a world of so many nuanced opinions, can we ever start from a point of mutual understanding?
Will: Absolutely, there is a spectrum, but I still think the conversation can be had in a mutually respectful, loving way. Take the widely accepted academic principles of learning theory with humans and animals, and the science supports using both reinforcers and punishers, so there's not really a debate to be had there.
The debate comes from the subjectivity of what, why, and when to use each tool. I don’t think we will agree on the specifics, and people find their own balance. For me, I took fundamentals from my work with special needs young people and integrated them into my dog training style.
For young people with special needs, you would never use a punisher to teach a behavior, but physical intervention is required in certain situations to keep everyone safe, including the young person. Another similarity to working with extreme cases of dog aggression.
We use non-physical ‘punishers’ with children because we can communicate with them linguistically. You can take TikTok off your kids, effectively removing access to their “treats”.
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It’s a punisher, and while it would be nice if we could do those things with dogs, we can’t. So yes, sometimes we might use a physical correction, but my head teacher used to always say something, and it stuck with me for my work with dogs.
“Always use the minimum amount of input to achieve the desired outcome.”
When working with dogs, I use the same principle, therefore aversive methods are used only when all positive or reinforcement-based methods have been tried unsuccessfully, or when the need for change is urgent. With your shelter example in Dallas, you might have a dog that will be euthanized in days if you can’t modify its behavior.
I’ve been in that situation of being the “last hope” countless times. In that situation, I can analyze that dog's behavior and determine the best path to saving the dog’s life. If the aversive tools in my toolbox might save that dog's life, I may use corrections to get the behavior under control and managed to a point where the dog and its owners are safe.
Less aversive strategies can be brought in with the luxury of time. That's where my system has evolved. If a trainer would rather use an aversive method, that’s a red flag, but I think most trainers would pick non-punishment-based methods wherever possible.
For all methodologies, we need to ask “Can we rely on that technique working consistently”. That's where I think the debate gets a bit deeper. Frankly, in these extreme behavior situations, the positive-only advocates need to do a better job of showing consistent results and making their tools more accessible.
Again, if it works, I'll champion that with you and I'll use my platform to champion it. However, many of my clients have been to 4 or more trainers where things haven't worked, and then we're in a last-ditch effort before euthanasia is discussed.
Greg: So in the right situation, and with the right tools, you agree with many methods of training?
Will: Right, it's extremely custom to the dog, the client, their lifestyle, their skill, and their ability to access and implement knowledge. It's great being able to give somebody a counter-conditioning desensitization process to fix reactivity, but what if the owner can't implement it?
The dog could be rehomed to a more competent owner, surrendered to a shelter, effectively writing a death sentence, or the owner could just live with that behavior while their dog lives in frustration and fear.
These are the potential outcomes when we don’t communicate, and I believe these conversations can be had in an empathetic, loving way between practitioners of different systems who may disagree on certain things, but who can align on important topics. Practitioners aligning would certainly reduce confusion among owners.
One of my big-picture ideas is to help narrow that division in practitioners by showing that there are lots of acceptable ways that we can train and that we should learn from each other.
For example, if a potential client wants to work on fun stuff and simple obedience, I’ll point them to positive-only trainers, where they’ll have more fun and success with somebody who focuses on those things. That also helps me focus on more serious cases and again, that to me seems like a no-brainer.
But I think in the training world, people get into a methodology and then feel the need to defend it to the hilt, meaning they would never dream of sending a client to the “other tribe”. Again, I'm just trying to break those barriers down a little bit, wherever possible.
Greg: I'd love to see more content that encourages less judgment in ownership and training styles. I want to remove that confusion for readers. I personally get it, we don’t all have the same dog ownership style, so different strokes for different folks, right? And for many, that’s not a satisfying answer.
Will: It's even more nuanced than different strokes for different folks. Two very similar dogs with the same issues often need different approaches. Bring two dogs to me displaying the same undesirable behavior.
Based on the dogs’ temperaments, genetics, and living environments, we will often choose two different training styles. Even my three dogs vary massively on how I train them, they just respond differently to different things.
With many of my courses, I have to condense that highly detailed academic information, coupled with my thoughts and ideas, into as simple and resonant a program as possible. I'm not training trainers who are working that dog full time, I’m helping Susan down the road with a new Labrador puppy.
She's never had a dog before and has two kids, a full-time job, and a life. I must make my material simple enough for her to understand and implement, yet nuanced enough to be successful. It's a challenge, to say the least, like constantly plugging new leaks.
Training for the real world
Will: I could do detailed behavior videos on social media, but it would go over people’s heads. Even when I do conferences and seminars for other trainers, you can see that there are levels within a room of how far you can push some of the detailed topics before people start to glaze over.
That’s being an educator, though, isn't it? To differentiate people’s learning styles and make content as accessible to as many people as possible. While conversations are amazing, it always has to come back to helping the people and helping their dogs. If the people and the dogs that you're meant to be helping aren't being helped, then you're failing.
The concept of Susan down the road is great. I’ve been guilty in the past of judging people who don’t have the same amount of time for their dogs that I do.
But there’s a massive gap between Susan who has less time than me, and someone running a fight ring, giving their dog the most tortuous existence. The way Susan and I love our dogs are both just fine in proper context.
Owner-shaming
Will: People are often worried that I'm going to shame or judge them, so they will lie and tell me what they think I want to hear. When we work with the dog, we quickly find out how the dog lives. I’ll go back through the consultant notes and I’m like ‘They're lying to us here’.
They're scared to tell us the truth, and we can see it in the dog, clear as day. So we try and build a rapport with clients that promotes honesty. If you work away from the house for 8 hours, tell us. If you tell us it’s 2 hours and it’s 8 in reality, the training won’t work out.
Fake standards and social media pressure also add to the shame people feel. I see this social experiment daily. I’ll get a DM describing someone’s despair. Their dog is reactive, has all kinds of issues, and may have a bite history, but their Socials are full of pictures of how great their dog is, and how much they love their dog.
Behind the scenes, they're thinking about having that dog euthanized, but hide it behind a veneer of perfect ownership.
Greg: I think we all love dogs to a different degree and need to be more ok with that. I've got a Turkish friend who loves dogs but can’t get her head around having a dog inside the house.
But if people feel that you are shaming them for how they interact with dogs, you create a wall.
Will: And what is a happy dog? On the flip side, there will be people who can't fathom the idea of a dog that lives indoors. I’ve been exploring Gundog training recently, and I've met some of the best trained, and what I will hand-on-heart say are some of the happiest, most fulfilled labradors I've ever encountered.
They've never been inside a house before. They’re outside except when they’re in the truck going back and forth between the field and the training areas, and they are happier dogs than a lot of the pampered dogs I’ve trained that live inside but are riddled with anxiety, confusion, and fear.
If you displayed both dogs and put it to a public vote of which dog is happier, and you didn't tell them the lives that they lead, 100% would point to the outdoor gundog. I'm certainly not saying that all dogs need to live outside. At all.
More than a person’s interpretation of a happy dog is often sheltered in their echo chamber. Pampered dog parenting gets promoted as the norm, and things outside the norm get criticized.
Greg: You're right. I didn't even think about it from that perspective. While there are people who can chain a dog up outside and neglect it, that's not the same as a dog that is fulfilling its working potential.
Will: We live on a farm and in the nice weather, I'll often leave the back door open. My Labrador won't leave my side, but if you give my Mastiffs the choice, even at night, they’d rather be outside. They'd rather be outside doing patrols of the fence line.
If I bring them inside, they sit at the door hoping that I'll let them out again. Instead of using comfortable beds that we spent a fortune on, they'd rather be out in the rain and mud, doing what they want, which is to guard, protect, and patrol.
Look at something like a Turkish Kangal. Good luck trying to keep them happy and fulfilled inside a house. They need hundreds of acres to patrol. They'd rather be in the snow and the rain and the bitter cold.
It makes them fulfilled and happy. So like training, depending on the needs of the breed, the happiness of the dog isn’t a one-size-fits-all either.
Breed-specific Traits
Greg: Speaking of breeds if we can, there are stories everywhere on breed-specific legislation with the XL Bully ban.
While I echo the sentiment of “no bad dogs, only bad owners”, I’ve definitely been guilty of under-assuming the effect of breed on traits and behaviors in general. Even in benign examples, like how Labradors love sticks!
Will: That's the example that I give all the time. When we see a Labrador carrying a stick, we all smile. That’s a Labrador being a Labrador. It's nice because it is that behavior that we deem acceptable, and we think it's lovely.
What about the many breeds with a long history of being bred for the sole purpose of being effective hunters and killers of other animals? The Labrador is having the time of his life retrieving, and we agree that is a trait of the breed.
We don't, however, want to agree or understand that the same thing can be said on the other side of the equation.
I’m with you, I think, with good training and good ownership, those things can be managed, but taking the desire to hunt, prey, and kill other animals out of some dogs is like trying to take the desire of fetching a tennis ball out of a Labrador.
A Jack Russell is another classic example. They’re great at killing rats, and if that gets displaced onto a cat or even a small child, that’s a huge problem. Yet the predisposition to the problem behavior stems from the selective breeding that we as humans did. In the right time and context, the behavior was useful, and we liked it about that dog.
This is why I do so much content around breed awareness. Owners should know what they’re signing up for with a breed, and to think that a dog that was bred to kill other animals will need the same attention as a dog that was bred to be a lap dog isn’t helpful.
Furthermore, if you want the dog that was bred to kill things to be a lap dog…to think that the same training protocol will result in the same outcome and that you won't have different challenges is naïve - and in my opinion, the root of many problems.
For example, an owner might choose a dog because it looks awesome, and regardless of breed, train it with a method they saw online that worked well with an Australian Shepherd, a dog that happens to be incredibly receptive to treat work and positive reinforcement.
Maybe the owner’s dog isn’t so responsive, yet everyone will be shocked when the dog kills a neighbor’s pet. With a little guidance, we could have pointed the owner to [adopt] a breed more receptive to training at their level of skill, ability, and availability to train.
Another good example would be an owner complaining that their Spaniel doesn't come back when it smells a bird. It's a common thing that people bring to my center. “I want my spaniel to have perfect recall, but if I take it out in the woods and he smells something, it runs off”.
That’s a Spaniel doing ‘Spaniely’ things. If perfect recall is a priority in your breed choice, then a working line Cocker Spaniel that you plan to walk around game birds would be a poor choice. That’s a predictable problem that we can help owners avoid.
The same thing can be said for dogs that were bred for more violent purposes. Again, it doesn't mean that I like certain breeds over others. It doesn't mean that I think certain breeds should be banned. I just think that we need to be better aware of these things ahead of time to make better-informed decisions.
For me, that's the first hurdle that people fall at, failing to choose a breed that fits their expectations, lifestyle, and current skill and knowledge level…and again, everything's on a spectrum. You can get a violent, aggressive Labrador, but it will be an outlier.
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In general, the people who deny the impact of the breed often haven't had the sheer volume of exposure to these dogs that someone like myself has. But when you do get exposed to a high volume of dogs of all breeds, you quite quickly see that there are tendencies and averages.
In poker terms, the dealer still might win, and you still might lose, but you should always stack the deck in your favor.
Imagine that specific dog behaviors are each given a score from 0 to 10, with 0 meaning the dog will never display that particular behavior, and 10 meaning the dog will always display the worst version of that behavior. Factors like genetics and predisposition give you a starting point somewhere on that spectrum.
With good training, adequate leadership skills, and all the things that we preach, you can then move the dog along that spectrum with time and skill. I'll always go to the Labrador example, in terms of likelihood to want to kill another dog, the Labrador is going to score low on that 0-10 spectrum.
So you have to really mess things up to push a typical labrador to that point. But if you start with a dog that was bred for dog fighting, take a Tosa Inu for example, they're going to score much higher on the likelihood of displaying that behavior.
As a result, you will need to ensure the dog’s behavior remains within healthy boundaries. Where you start on that spectrum essentially informs how much work you will need to put in to get them where you want them to be.
Greg: It seems like there's no dog that you can't work with if the owner’s committed, am I right?
Will: Yes, we don't turn down any dog for the severity of the behavior. There are dogs that have neurological problems akin to mental health disorders that might fall outside the realm of traditional behavior modification strategies, at that point we consult a vet and it requires a collaborative effort to continue making progress with that dog.
Human behavior can give us some good analogies when we discuss dog behavior. There might be times in my own life, getting road rage in traffic for example, where I might have that instinct to want to do something I shouldn't, but with my upbringing and the ongoing training that we all go through as humans, that keeps me making healthy decisions.
Dogs need the same reminder to keep making the right decisions. The analogy even stretches to high-energy, potentially problematic dogs. I’ve read countless books on the extreme people who train for the SAS or the Royal Marines. You often hear those soldiers say things like, “If I hadn't found that path, I would have been in prison”.
For people with a high need for excitement and thrill, you’ll often hear them discuss how lucky they were to be able to put that energy into a socially acceptable outlet.
There are certain dogs with the same extreme personalities that need strong structure and leadership in their life to avoid becoming ill-behaved or aggressive. That's why I talk about the need for loving leadership to ensure that dogs can be safe, functioning members of our society.
Discussion on Grief
Greg: Before the interview, we briefly discussed grief and dealing with a dog’s passing. I've got three dogs over the age of 10 now, and when I read about your Mastiff passing before you got Sully, that grief hit hard.
Personally, the only thing that gives me any kind of solace concerning my dog's passing is the opportunity it brings to help more dogs.
Will: I tried to come up with a useful, clever answer for coping with pet grief and I just couldn't. I’m resigned to the fact that I don't even think there is an answer. It…is…horrible. Some people manage it by vowing to never get another dog and avoiding future grief altogether.
I think it’s the people who have one dog who struggle the most. For people like you, who have multiple dog households, the unfortunate reality is you kind of have no choice. It's the same situation for me, I've got three dogs.
When one of them dies, I've still got to get up the next day and walk the other two and feed the other two, and I think that helped me a little bit versus losing an only dog.
While I’ve gone through the loss of pet dogs as a kid, I’ve now had to face it as an adult. That horrible experience of going into a vet and holding a dog while they're put to sleep.
Greg: Write me off for a week or two in that situation.
Will: That was my experience. I don't pretend to be a tough guy; I sobbed my eyes out. Each day it got a bit better. Over time you look back on the fond memories, and if you’re lucky, you have your current pack to distract you, and I think that's why I'll always have a pack.
With Sully being 7 now, and knowing what a Labrador's life expectancy is, my wife and I have been having a conversation about bringing a new Labrador puppy into our lives this year, because I want a good couple of years of Sully still being in peak performance, helping me train the next dog and to be the role model that I need him to be.
I'm getting emotional even having this conversation now, but especially with the knowledge that he is drawing into his senior years, the thought of being without him is awful. If people think I've got a kind of favoritism thing there, I'd encourage them to watch the documentary.
Between losing my Bull Mastiff and getting Sully, we had that hole, and that's why I vowed that I’ll never do that again. I’ll always have a crossover, and it's awful to think about, but on that day when the horrible happens, I've got to go for a walk.
I can't stay in bed because the other two dogs still need me to get up and take them for a walk, and that’s a very useful motivator when you’re that low.
Greg: We shouldn't shame ourselves about needing time to grieve. But in that moment, I kind of find it useful to say to myself, “This isn’t about you, your grief, or your depression, this is about the dogs that are still with you who need a walk.”
Will: It may be an unpopular opinion, and this is from somebody who has had severe struggles with mental health, but I think the reality of mental health is that it's a somewhat selfish thing. My battle with mental health is how I feel and the things that I'm struggling with…it's all a bit “me, me, me” and a lot of pointing inwards.
And I found that one of, if not the best coping strategy, is to make my life less about me and more about others. Dogs, I think, are probably one of the easiest ways that people can do that, but more generally, I think the more selfless you can become (and I can only really speak from my own experience), the more you get the byproduct of becoming happier, and the mental health demons stay at bay.
Whereas the more you make it about you, the more those demons come flooding back. So, between dogs and people, I try and prioritize helping. You could even call me selfish for doing that, I would accept it, that's just my philosophy.
Do happy, calm dogs get it from their owners?
Will: I love working with dogs. but I'm helping the client, the person involved, and there's a weird dichotomy there as well. In my experience, dogs are happier when people are prioritizing themselves. I haven’t fully fleshed this idea out, but I think it could be worthy of an academic study.
“How does an owner’s over-prioritization of dog needs vs. human needs contribute to poor behavioral outcomes”, or something to that effect.
The study would be fascinating because I have strong anecdotal evidence from my own training that when people prioritize the dog over themselves and put all of that on to the dog, that's when I see the biggest instances of anxiety in dogs.
Picking up on the gun dog example from earlier. You won’t find their handlers constantly ‘doting’ on their dogs in the traditional sense, because those dogs are assets and tools to them first and foremost, but as a byproduct of their work and life in general, you get some of the happiest, most fulfilled dogs I've ever seen.
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People are often even surprised when they see me with my dogs, and I'm not always doting on them. If you come into my house as my guest, your comfort is my first priority. My dogs will be either in their crates, or they'll be on their beds. At that moment I am hosting the person, and the dogs are not the priority, my guests are.
If the dogs can be well behaved, they can join us. My dogs know what the rules and boundaries are to be able to join us in that situation. Many people are on the flip side of that, where the dogs’ needs would come first, and therefore they won't have guests in their home.
However, their dogs are riddled with anxiety and behavior problems. I'm generalizing there, of course, but there's a correlation there that’s worthy of a study. That's why I say, “Leadership is love”. When a dog is led, they become calm and relaxed and happier and fulfilled dogs.
Whereas when the dog is doing the leading, they are uncomfortable in their own skin, and that is where you get unhappy dogs and the behavior issues that come with that.
Another observation I’ve made is in keeping with our discussion on leading being an essential part of dog ownership and is that those either active in or are veterans of the Armed Forces typically have an instinctive, loving leadership style that works beautifully with dogs.
It is that calm, assertive leadership that Caesar [Milan] would call it. I can’t think of an example where I've seen someone with a military background have behavior problems with their dogs.
That doesn't mean they’re using any physically aversive methods, I just believe that they have an appropriate leadership style, which when coupled with the typical military discipline and routine, works well with dogs.
Thinking about it a slightly different way, simply to educate, my observation is that the more fast-paced, chaotic nature of some busy households can lead to behavior issues that I wouldn’t see in a dog with calm, loving leaders.
The dogs that I encounter that live in those less-structured environments do struggle yet improve massively through one of our intensive day programs. Adding some loving direction and routine has an amazing effect. You can see the weight of the world come off their shoulders and it's a beautiful thing to behold.
To those that might challenge the use of even the lightest correction, it’s just one piece of the puzzle and by giving direction, you don't create a scared, shut-down dog. You see the opposite the dog goes from being scared and quivering to being relaxed.
Before our session, the dog couldn’t settle and was uncomfortable in his own skin. Two hours later, he’s fast asleep, having what looks like the best sleep he’s ever had. All the dog ever wanted was direction, and now that he has that, he can relax. That all comes from loving leadership.
Greg: And I think more than providing the dogs and owners with relief, you’ve also helped yourself out massively by aligning your career now with a true passion.
It’s clearly been a massive help to you, and I’d venture to say several of us could learn from that lesson of drifting from what makes you happy.
Taking note of the time, it’s been wonderful chatting, many thanks for contributing to the magazine, Will. I know our readers will get some great value from our conversation.
Will: I really enjoyed it, let’s make sure it’s not the last conversation we have!
