05/27/2026
We do not condone "alpha theory". The peraon who worked on that theory discredited it himself!
Abuse is not training and pain is not training.
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1CMG8xuwHY/
𝐃𝐨𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐃𝐨𝐠 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐁𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐢𝐧 𝐒𝐮𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐞 𝐂𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐭 𝐂𝐚𝐬𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐒𝐨𝐮𝐭𝐡 𝐊𝐨𝐫𝐞𝐚
Today we talk about huge news for dogs in South Korea, where the Supreme Court has just handed down a landmark ruling against a dog kindergarten operator who pinned a terrified 3.5kg senior poodle between his legs for fourteen minutes.
The trainer, an 80kg adult male, claimed this was ‘dominance’ or ‘hierarchy’ (wonder which YouTube shockbro video he was copying) training after the frightened 10 year old dog bit his hand. And there it is again. The same tired, discredited nonsense that continues to infect dog training culture all over the world.
The owner had already warned him that the dog was elderly, sensitive, fearful of men, and lacked social confidence. So naturally, according to the logic of dominance trainers, the correct response was to crush the tiny dog into the floor until its teeth dislocated, blood poured from its mouth, and it eventually defecated from stress.
And he did not stop when the injuries became obvious (which rings true given that I just watched a video of a very popular shockbro influencer telling someone that their dog should recall perfectly because it fears death – you can’t make this stuff up).
According to the court findings, he continued restraining the dog while wiping blood from its mouth. Imagine being so committed to your pseudoscientific alpha-wolf cosplay that you look at a bleeding elderly poodle and think, ‘Yes, excellent, the learning process is continuing nicely.’
The Supreme Court rejected his defence completely. They ruled that causing pain and injury under the guise of training is animal abuse, especially when other methods exist and when the dog is clearly distressed.
This ruling is important far beyond South Korea because the exact same garbage exists everywhere. The language changes slightly like ‘balanced,’ ‘pack leadership,’ ‘corrections,’ and ‘respect.’ But scratch beneath the branding and far too often it boils down to using fear, pain, intimidation, flooding, physical force, and learned helplessness, then dressing it up as expertise.
And the people doing it continue to hide behind one of the biggest failures in animal welfare regulation in much of the world. Almost anyone can call themselves a dog trainer.
No protected title, mandatory education, meaningful oversight, no accountability, and no universally enforced welfare standards. Not a bloody thing.
You need qualifications to cut hair properly in many countries. But if you want to psychologically and physically influence an animal with the emotional development of a small child, apparently all you need is a TikTok account and the confidence of a man explaining cryptocurrency at a barbecue.
What also continues to baffle me is the silence from so much of the training industry itself. Where are the trainers publicly demanding regulation? Where are the large scale campaigns to protect the profession from these people? Because every time one of these cases hits the news, the reputation of ethical trainers takes another punch to the throat.
If you are genuinely skilled, educated, humane, and evidence based, why would you not want the profession regulated? Why would you not want standards? Why would you not want the dangerous cowboys removed from the field?
Instead, every time regulation is discussed, there is a predictable chorus of outrage from people screaming that their freedoms are under attack. Those ‘freedoms’ always seem to include the freedom to frighten, hurt, pin, shock, choke, hit, flood, or dominate dogs without scrutiny.
South Korea’s Supreme Court has now drawn a legal line. Pain and injury are not magically transformed into training because somebody says the word ‘dominance’ with enough confidence.
The rest of the world needs to catch up.
Oh, and for those who are going to pull the ‘whatabout’ argument, which is what the animal abusers always do when confronted with something they don’t like, the Ministry of Justice in South Korea is proposing to formally change the legal status of animals from mere ‘objects’ under the Civil Act, and a nationwide ban on the dog meat trade is scheduled to take effect in 2027.
