Sometimes, people are surprised when they hear me speak about issues outside of dog training – for example, Palestinian liberation.
But when you strip it down, those issues come back to the same question:
Do we normalize systems of control and domination…
Or do we build relationships based on care, respect, and freedom?
Whether we’re talking about dog training or human rights, oppression always hides behind the same lies:
“It’s necessary.”
“It’s the only way to keep order.”
“It’s for their own good.”
And liberation always starts with refusing to accept those excuses.
Abolitionist thinkers have taught us for decades that oppression is never isolated.
It reproduces itself in every arena where domination becomes normalized.
Palestine shows us one face of oppression: occupation, dispossession, surveillance, control, and relentless, catastrophic violence being enacted by Israel and the United States.
In dog training, we see a different face of oppression every day, when trainers silence dogs’ emotions, punish fear-based reactions, and enforce strict obedience while trivializing or outright dismissing their learners’ wellbeing.
Of course the stakes are not the same.
The point is not to collapse these struggles into one, but to expose the same carceral logic at work in each.
Frantz Fanon wrote that colonization always begins with the claim that the oppressed are less capable of reason, less human, less trustworthy with freedom.
That lie justifies stripping them of dignity in the name of “order” or “protection.”
That same lie shows up when trainers insist that obedience matters more than welfare.
It is the same carceral logic: control at any cost.
The entire concept of “care” is weaponized into domination.
It matters to connect these struggles.
When you refuse domination in one place – and truly understand WHY – your vision sharpens.
Suddenly you’ll see it everywhere you look.
Liberation is not partial.
We have to tear out oppression at the root, across all its forms.
None of us are free until we all are.