Why rewards, praise, purpose, and the desire to please matter more than force when training a dog.
Story & Photography by Nathan Sparks
Appeared in Cityview Magazine, Vol. 42, Issue 4 (July/August 2026)
When I sat down to write this article, I felt like I was listening to that old Johnny Cash song where he rattles off every town he’s ever been to. Except my list wasn’t towns, it was dogs. Beau and Bonnie. Smoke and King. Sean. Jackson. Radar and Sade. Smoky then Clicker. Bella the Basset Hound, a comedy act on four short legs. Stretchy, a miniature dachshund, proof that great dogs come in small packages. The two Great Danes, proof they come in enormous ones too. Gunner. Bravo, the Cityview mascot himself, who graced these pages more times than any dog in the magazine’s history. And now Chota Rocket. I’ve been everywhere, man — and almost everywhere I went, there was a dog.
This is the third installment in our dog training series, and I figured it was time to dig into the question underneath all training: what is it that actually motivates a dog? I never fancied myself a dog trainer, but I’ve always been pretty good at getting into something, and as I’ve learned from Mike Osteen and his son Jon at Pet Resorts at The Farm, there’s a lot more to a dog than meets the eye. Still, after sixty years of field research, I have some findings of my own to report.
It started with Beau and Bonnie. Beau was an English Pointer, Bonnie a Gordon Setter, and they were my dad’s hunting dogs — though make no mistake, they were the family pets, too. Dad had asthma, so the dogs didn’t live in the house. They had nice runs and insulated, heated houses for the winter, which back then was practically a canine country club. Dad loved to hunt, and as I got older we’d spend whole days walking the woods and fields after upland gamebirds. My favorite part was never the shooting, but watching the dogs work. Those dogs were motivated by something ancient — the prey instinct, pure and uncut. Dad trained them constantly; we even kept live quail just for that purpose. Otherwise, they were relatively ordinary dogs, but put them on a bird scent and they became artists. Beau and Bonnie eventually gave us Smoke and King, mixed pups but lovable through and through.
It wasn’t until we got our first Irish Setter, a few dogs down the road, that I learned dogs are motivated by other things too. Things like mischief. Sean was a trickster. By then we lived in the city, and he wasn’t supposed to run free, but you can’t keep an Irish Setter penned up all the time in a quiet neighborhood. Sean would get out, stretch his legs, and shop. He had a fascination with bringing things home. Never a pair of shoes — just one shoe. Some days he’d haul in a dozen single shoes, like he was building the world’s most useless closet. Other days it was bedsheets, snatched right off the clotheslines people still used back then. I suppose a flapping bedsheet is irresistible if you’re a dog with a strong tug instinct and no moral compass.
Then came the landscaping incident. Our neighbor had been to the store and bought what must have been several hundred plants, all in little six-inch pots, for a big project. Sean apparently decided this was the greatest treasure of his career, because one at a time, he picked those pots up in his mouth, carried them to our yard, and set them down in a nice, neat line. When we discovered it, we carried every one of them back, but the neighbor was not amused, and rather than walk over and ask us to keep the dog up, she went straight to the police and filed a charge.
Next thing we knew, an officer was at the door with a warrant. Dog at large. Off to court we went, attorney in tow. We arrived on what was evidently Public Drunkenness Day. The judge sat with his head propped in his hand — at times almost laid flat on the bench — while a parade of defendants came forward. The clerk would read the charge, the accused would open his mouth to explain, and before a single word landed, the gavel would crack. Guilty, pay the fine or spend thirty days in jail. Next.
My heart sank. This man wasn’t listening to anybody, and I was sure we were in serious trouble. When our case was called, the judge lifted his head, looking no more amused with us than the drunks. My brother testified about how much he loved the dog and only wanted to exercise him which the judge noted. Our neighbor, unrepresented, took the stand, swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. What followed was a rantings and ravings of how our dog harassed her and her cat. The moment she said “that dog chases my cat,” it was over. The judge straightened up and announced: “The court will acknowledge that dogs chase cats, I’m dismissing this case. I want you people to take your matters and settle them amongst yourselves — this does not belong in the legal system.” At that, the woman’s son, a grown man of thirty-five or forty, jumped up and shouted, “Hold on a minute, Your Honor!” The judge informed him that one more word would earn him a contempt charge and an escort from the bailiff. It was my first introduction to a courtroom, and a fairly fun one at that.
We prevailed! Sean stayed with the family for years after, often at my side, including the stretch when I was a partner in a river rafting company on the Nolichucky, living right on the banks of the Nolichucky River below Devil’s Looking Glass. That dog knew how to enjoy himself. He’d chase butterflies through the fields with total commitment, and he loved trying to catch minnows in the pond, thrusting his whole head under the water and coming up empty and delighted every time.
We hadn’t been at the river long before we noticed something at night: from a half mile down the valley, you could hear puppies crying. There was a fenced in county dumpsite packed with dumpsters — and people would bring boxes of puppies, pups so little they could barely walk, and just leave them. It was the saddest thing I’d ever heard, and what did we do? We adopted them all. Before long we had what seemed like twenty-five dogs running around at any given time, and a standing deal: anyone who adopted a dog got a free trip down the river. We didn’t have the facilities. We just let them hang out, hoped the rafting customers would fall in love, and quite a few did.
After all these dogs, what motivates them? I took the question to the man who’d know. Mike Osteen of Pet Resorts, our series sponsor and one of the finest dog trainers in the country, has spent more than forty years training everything from family pets to elite field trial champions. I watched him work a young retriever on a water blind, and he explained why the dog crashes through the pond instead of running around it. “When they jump in the water, we reward them for hitting the water, so it builds their desire to want to hit it,” he told me. “The reward gives it to them. They should desire it instead of just being made to do it.” There it is, the whole secret in two sentences: desire, not force.
Mike builds wanting, and when a dog struggles? “If a dog fails, your job is to lessen the task but keep the standard the same.” Simplify the job, never the expectation. Mike’s son Jon, who trains alongside his father at Pet Resorts, starts every dog the same way — through motivation, reward, and praise, building the dog’s confidence before anything else. He also offered up the single most piercing line of this whole project. When I asked how he can tell whether a problem dog is a training issue or a household issue, he said: “The respect the dog has for whoever is on the other end of the leash tells me everything I need to know about that relationship.” Ouch. But true. The leash runs both directions.
The rest of the training world agrees on the fundamentals, with their own accents. Veteran national trainer Ed Frawley boils motivation down to four levers — food, toys or prey, praise, and correction — and says real training means creating an atmosphere where the dog actively wants to learn. Victoria Stilwell’s positive-training school adds that no two dogs rank those rewards the same: some dogs would sell you out for a piece of cheese, others want the ball, others just want to hear “good boy” in the right tone of voice. Here in Knoxville, the trainers at North Star K9 say the same thing in their own way — every dog is uniquely motivated, and the trainer’s first job is detective work, figuring out what makes that particular dog light up. The folks at Sit Means Sit build their whole national system on the dog’s attention and focus. Different schools, same foundation: figure out your dog’s currency, then pay in it.
Here’s what my unscientific field research adds. The one unifying trait, from bird dogs to dumpsite orphans, is the desire to please. Dogs like to have a job and know what they’re supposed to do. Beau’s job was birds. Sean’s job, as he understood it, was inventory acquisition. Give a dog a clear job and a boss worth pleasing, and most of your training is already done. Dogs also love having a place of their own. A crate isn’t a cage — it’s their den, a safe spot where nobody can bother them. Mike put it plainly: “If we don’t have time to give the dog our undivided attention, then the crate is our best friend.” And in all these years, I’ve never met a dog that didn’t want to live in the house. Some are just messier about it than others–the crate helps. The real point, though, is simpler than all of it: have fun with your dog, whatever that looks like. Take a walk. Play fetch. Go hunting. Chase butterflies. Or just hang out. The motivation runs both ways.
Next issue, we’re reviewing a pile of products that make living with and training your dog easier — everything from kennels to collars. Until then, the court will acknowledge that dogs chase cats.
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