On November 16 dog trainer Ami Moore, who advertises herself as Chicago’s Dog Whisperer, was acquitted in misdemeanor court of two counts of animal cruelty. She was arrested in July 2006, after witnesses told police they’d seen her using electronic collars on a bichon frise and a Newfoundland in ways that made the dogs pant, tremble, and yelp. .
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Trainers who practice positive-reinforcement methods, which are usually based on animal behavior science, reward the dog for good behavior rather than punishing it for bad. Most of them seem to be of two minds about regulation. They generally favor the idea, but there’s no consensus on the standards licensing would be expected to defend. “There are so many ways of training, who’s going to say what works and what doesn’t?” says agility trainer Stacey Hawk, who cochairs the Dog Advisory Work Group, a citywide dog advocacy group. “How would you get everyone to agree? It would be way too hard to set this up.”
DAWG sent a representative to nearly every hearing in Moore’s case. A half dozen witnesses to Moore’s handling of dogs eventually spoke to investigators; they got to know one another and became somewhat organized, and they also had someone present at almost every court date. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals submitted a letter to the assistant state’s attorney prosecuting the case, urging him to push for jail time.
In court, Moore gave her own accounts of how she trained the Newfoundland and the bichon. She admitted to strapping a collar around the Newfoundland’s neck and she recalled the dog emitting an “excited prey type yell.” But she said she never activated the collar. To support Moore, the defense put on the Newfoundland’s owner, who wasn’t present at the scene that witnesses reported to the police.
The state rounded up two expert witnesses of its own, but submitted their names to the court so late in the pretrial process that the judge refused to let them testify. I was able to talk to one of them—John Ciribassi, a veterinarian at Chicagoland Veterinary Behavior Consultants who’s also board certified in animal behavior by the American College of Veterinary Behavior. “Most veterinary behaviorists are not comfortable with use of electronic collars in training,” he said. “You’re causing the animal to suffer through an amount of pain and discomfort until it figures out what you want it to do. It may never figure that out. And you could easily apply the punishment too late, at the wrong intensities, or out of anger.”
