“But I think the stern method would be needed for dogs with more rebellious characters”
Dog training is really so simple it’s a sin.
All you have to remember is that “aggression breeds aggression”.
If you ‘fight’ your dog, he will fight back.
You get nowhere, fast.
You need to think like a dog and understand what they understand.
I see ‘obedience dogs’ now who are literally prancing along bizarrely because they never ever take their eyes off their handler’s face.
That is just freakish.
There’s a huge difference between an obedient dog and an automaton who is in incapable of independent thought.
The ‘face starers’ are so paranoid about ‘missing a cue’ that they become almost mindless with tension.
I can’t imagine living a life like that.
What if I passed out and I’m just laying there with a dog who’s *still* staring at my face, waiting for directions because it cannot/will not think/act on its own?
My dogs walk beside me, constantly scanning their surroundings for potential problems, reacting to my directional shifts through the leash or contact with my hip, not staring slavishly at my face.
A great example is a seeing eye dog.
They’re not constantly looking at their owner’s face in anticipation of some capricious change of direction or command.
They’re watching *everything* else at once.
“Stern” up against “rebellious” is actually the worst way to go.
An emotionally agitated trainer is an ineffective trainer.
Now my dog is mostly off the leash when I walk with her (I live in an apartment on the outskirts of Warsaw, Poland, but we have a lot of open space around and a big forest 25 minutes walk away and an old Tsarist era fort nearby with mounds and hillocks ) and she's at my heels when I tell her to be, even when crossing a road or when she sees other dogs around and she knows when I say "go", she's free to run off and play
the beauty is, that she obeys other people as well, so we have no problem with leaving her with other folks when we have to go for a holiday.
Perhaps it's also doggie temperament I guess