Friday, December 30, 2011

There are good things.

Judging by the name of this blog, you can imagine that the contents of the posts are not always cheery. There are some great signs out there that things are changing, and most encouragingly for me - mindsets.

One little example is pet training. We recently welcomed Spencer into our house. Spencer is a puppy - see picture. We decided to get him all trained up and so started finding out about puppy training schools. Most training schools these days appear to work entirely with non-violence, all training is done through encouragement and rewards, and ignoring bad behaviour.

What does this all have to do with the state of the world? Thinking about this, I thought that there is no way that these sorts of ideas could spill over into the trainer's and the human trainee's (it's as much about training the custodian as it is about training the dog!) lives. I quickly checked the cynic in me. I think it is safe to presume that if a trainer is training people through encouragement rather than punishment, they will treat people close to them and who they interact with in the same way.

So this is just one small example of how I see mindsets and attitudes changing. Yes, I blog about a lot of really bad stuff happening out there in the world, but things are changing, quickly.