21/05/2026
You would never allow anyone to do the same to your child, would you?
So why would you allow anyone to harm your best friend?
I have to avoid Facebook sometimes because the amount of blatant abuse dressed up as “training” is honestly disturbing.
I just watched a video of a terrified dog being restrained while flooding techniques were used, and people in the comments were praising it like it’s some kind of breakthrough. It isn’t. The dog isn’t “learning safety.” The dog is learning that panic doesn’t work, escape is impossible, and eventually the nervous system shuts down.
That is not emotional regulation. That is not trust. That is not healing. It’s learned helplessness.
And this isn’t some “difference of opinion” debate anymore. We have decades of research in behaviour science, neuroscience, attachment, stress physiology, and mammalian emotional systems. We KNOW flooding can suppress outward reactions while leaving the internal emotional state untouched, or worse.
A dog going still does not automatically mean a dog feels safe.
This obsession with shortcuts is exhausting. If it feels like a trick, a quick fix, or a hack to bypass emotion instead of working through it, it isn’t right. Mammals are complex. Dogs are emotional, social beings with nervous systems designed around safety, attachment and co-regulation.
You cannot force a dog into calmness through terror and call it rehabilitation.
And the arrogance of mocking people who question it? Calling concerned owners “trolls” because they don’t want to watch an animal scream and thrash in panic? Come on.
We need to stop for a second and think about our own experiences as mammals. Fear, overwhelm, panic, helplessness, shutdown, these are not uniquely human experiences. If someone held you down while you were terrified until you stopped reacting, would you genuinely call that feeling safe? Or would you call it giving up because escape felt impossible?
Dogs are not robots. They are emotional, social mammals with nervous systems remarkably similar to our own. Behaviour doesn’t exist separately from emotion. Suppressing the outward expression does not mean the internal experience has healed.
