A dog can stop barking because the thing that frightened her has become less frightening, but she can also stop barking while remaining afraid... Those outcomes can look remarkably similar when the principal question being asked is whether the dog reacted.
When someone calls me after a serious bite and says, “He's always been such a good dog. This came out of nowhere,” I don't hear those two statements as a contradiction anymore. I hear them as the beginning of an investigation.
Over the years, I've come to think of training less as teaching and more as organized learning.
When the United States was founded 250 years ago, the average American dog lived a very different life than the average American dog does today.
Dogs spend an extraordinary amount of time trying to understand us. What I've come to appreciate over the years is that the process works best when we're willing to spend some time understanding them, too.