What training my chaotic dog taught me about power, control – and human beings | Dogs | The Guardian

The holy grail of dog training is focus, whereby the dog stares unerringly at their handler, waiting for instruction, regardless of distractions around them. The websites and YouTube videos of celebrity trainers feature images of smiling men and women sitting casually at picnic tables or standing in high streets while a seemingly hypnotised doberman or vizsla (never, I’ve noticed, a boxer …) stands stock still beside them – irrefutable evidence of the trainer’s powers of control.

Moralising and punishing don’t work for dogs, modern trainers argue, for the same reason that they do work for humans, according to Nietzsche. If a dog breaks a rule and then gets punished two minutes later, it has no understanding of how one led to the other. All it knows is that it has been harmed. For Nietzsche, humans become moral creatures once they understand how transgression A leads to penalty B, even when there is a substantial delay – potentially years – between the two. Humans are disciplined, punished and educated until they acquire that internal capacity that Nietzsche believed was most repressive of all: a guilty conscience, the most ingenious instrument of control ever invented. Freedom from guilt would mean living in the moment and forgetting one’s sins: in other words, becoming more like dogs.
— Read on www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/25/what-training-my-chaotic-dog-taught-me-about-power-control-and-human-beings