Dog trainer licensing

Compare the bills · CCPDT and AVSAB · Police exemptions · Before it becomes law

A trainer’s license is government permission to practice. Certification comes from a private organization. New Jersey’s proposed dog training laws would connect the two, giving established organizations or their credentials a role in deciding who qualifies to work as a trainer.

Without a professional licensing requirement, families are left to judge a trainer’s qualifications and methods for themselves. “Buyer beware” feels like an understatement when you’re paying someone to advise you about modifying your dog’s behavior in an industry where ethics are not necessarily considered first and foremost.

You should not have to discover after hiring someone that the certification or license you trusted still allows them to shock your dog.

I do not assume that more licensing, policing, or punishment will make dogs safer. Giving the state more power over who can work deserves scrutiny too. My concern is preventing harm and challenging the institutions that normalize it, including when those institutions are writing the rules.

I want dogs protected from pain, fear, intimidation, and coercion. That requires attention to their emotional welfare, access to humane help, appropriate veterinary referral, and meaningful ways for people to raise concerns and prevent further harm. Public education should help people find ethical professionals. Accountability when trainers harm dogs must prevent further harm. None of that can be reduced to issuing a license or imposing a punishment.

You do not have to oppose licensing in principle to oppose these bills. Wanting families protected is a reason to scrutinize what a license would permit and whom the rules would exempt.

I have been in this industry for a long time, and I have seen what happens when there are no standards. Dogs get hurt. Families get misled. People confuse confidence with competence.

Two proposals in New Jersey

New Jersey has two different proposals for licensing paid dog trainers. A4206 and S4576 are the same proposal in the Assembly and Senate; A4207 is a separate alternative. Neither proposal itself bans aversive training methods.

A4207’s reference to older standards matters. For example, the International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants’ current standards reject intentional pain, fear, and intimidation. A reference to an older shared framework cannot simply be treated as adoption of that newer position.

I oppose A4207 in its current form. Police and military exemptions must be removed, and the standard must prohibit pain, fear, intimidation, and coercion. Removing an exemption would not, by itself, make this bill worthy of support. We still have to examine what the remaining rules permit and whose power they expand.

Police and military exemptions must be removed from dog training regulation bills. No exemptions. No excuses.

Last checked October 15, 2026: A4206 and A4207 remain referred to the Assembly Regulated Professions Committee, and S4576 to the Senate Commerce Committee. None has been enacted.

How the earlier bills connect

A4207 carries forward A1212. A1212, from the 2024–25 session, used the credentialing framework and included exclusions for specified police and military training. It did not advance beyond introduction.

A4206/S4576 continues an older licensing proposal built around examinations and consultation with CCPDT.

S4576 was introduced on September 28 with the same substantive text as A4206.

In the 2024–25 session, S3814 would have required a humane code prohibiting aversive methods, while excluding trainers of police dogs and dogs intended for federal or state agencies to protect the public. It did not advance beyond introduction.

That police exception remains unacceptable even in a bill with stronger protections for other dogs.

Ask who requested the exemptions and demand that lawmakers publish the supporting testimony and lobbying records. Share the bill text and explain what it would allow someone to do to a dog.

When a credential becomes state authority

An exam can test knowledge of learning theory while the organization’s rules still permit pain and fear. A complaint system can exist while treating those methods as acceptable. If that becomes the state’s standard, a guardian’s concern can be answered with the very credential that helped reassure them in the first place.

Neither proposal guarantees a seat for a board-certified veterinary behaviorist. A4206/S4576 require two licensed veterinarians. A4207 allows its veterinarian seat to be filled by a veterinarian with professional dog training certification instead of that specialist qualification.

I oppose A4206/S4576 in their current forms. As I explain in my analysis of these proposals, the goal should not be to license the industry as it exists.

A frightened family should be able to ask for help without having to become experts in every credential and every euphemism the training industry uses. If a trainer promises to help with fear or aggression, the family deserves to know whether that means addressing the dog’s distress or making the dog afraid to show it. I explain how punishment is presented as professional help in “Balanced” Training.

CCPDT's misrepresentation of AVSAB

The American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior (AVSAB) had rejected aversive methods in its published 2021 humane-training position. Yet in 2025, material CCPDT emailed to trainers invoked an outdated AVSAB position to justify allowing those methods. AVSAB’s name was being used to lend credibility to practices its actual guidance opposed.

My criticism of that misrepresentation was explicit: “They have, seemingly deliberately, sent out false information misrepresenting AVSAB’s clear positions.”

AVSAB subsequently issued a public clarification. It confirmed that an outdated, rescinded document was circulating and that its 2021 position remained authoritative. Aversive methods should not be used in any circumstances, regardless of the equipment or the trainer’s experience.

CCPDT judges other trainers’ competence, yet it misrepresented the guidance it sent them about how dogs should be treated. Trainers could come away believing veterinary behavior experts supported practices they had already rejected. People trusting the credential may never know the difference. And this is the organization A4206/S4576 would ask to help set the requirements for a license.

CCPDT’s current policy restricts shock-collar use, including prohibiting it for dogs under one year, basic skills, aggression, anxiety, fears, and phobias. It still permits use in certain situations involving safety risks, subject to requirements for education, monitoring and documentation. AVSAB rejects aversives in all contexts.

This is why I have called CCPDT an “outlier extremist organization.”

For anyone holding a credential, “certification is only valuable if the ethics behind it are sound.” Trainers who earned a credential in good faith do not owe an organization permanent loyalty. Our responsibility is to the dogs and people affected by our work.

No exemptions. No excuses.

A law that protects dogs from abuse except when police are doing it is not protecting dogs. It is protecting police.

Our profession cannot reject fear, pain, and forced compliance in private training while codifying an exemption for the institution with the greatest power to use them against the public.

When unchecked state power crosses into our profession, we have to hold the line. Welfare professionals advocate for the welfare of ALL animals. We do not negotiate with oppressive institutions.

If police K-9 training methods were humane and science-based, there would be no need to exclude them from oversight. Instead, these carve-outs function as a preemptive shield against accountability, ensuring that K-9 handlers can continue using coercion and force-based methods with no consequences under this licensing system.

This reflects a larger pattern of ‘police exceptionalism’ where laws meant to increase accountability don’t actually apply to law enforcement. These exemptions exist to protect law enforcement’s ability to use violence unchecked, whether against dogs or people.

Lawmakers must stop bending to police unions. These carve-outs exist solely due to police lobbying, not because they serve a legitimate purpose, but to preserve policing tactics rooted in slavery-era patrols and Jim Crow enforcement.

If a humane standard applies to civilian trainers, it should apply when the trainer works for the government too. Rules governing when an agency may deploy a dog against a person do not excuse placing government dog trainers outside the humane-training rule.

Police dogs also raise a second question that trainer licensing alone cannot answer: why are police using dogs to search, threaten, bite, restrain, or injure people at all?

Detection dogs are a cornerstone of the racist War on Drugs. The use of drug detection dogs is not about public safety, it’s about expanding police power under the pretense of legitimacy. Abolition cannot stop at dogs trained to bite while leaving detection programs intact.

Attack-trained police dogs escalate violence. The use of police dogs to patrol crowds and control suspects is a direct legacy of colonial rule, slavery patrols, and segregation enforcement. The Weaponized Dogs investigation follows the harm to dogs and people and the systems that authorize it. The wider Cops + Dogs project brings together that investigation and reporting on individual cases.

My position is abolition of police K-9 units, including drug-detection and patrol or apprehension programs, alongside investment in civilian search-and-rescue capacity and nonviolent, community-based approaches to safety.

If we care about both dogs and people, we need to be pushing toward the abolition of K-9 units entirely, not just minor reforms to how they are trained.

Before it becomes law

Once a credential becomes a legal requirement, the organization behind it gains power over who can practice, what gets taught, and what the public is encouraged to trust.

The financial interests behind the International Association of Canine Professionals’ defense of punishment-based training raise a related concern. Shock-collar companies Dogtra and E-Collar Technologies appear on IACP’s own platinum sponsor list. I have called IACP “the most problematic organization in dog training.” When lawmakers decide whose expertise to recognize, the profession’s commercial interests cannot substitute for the welfare of the animals it claims to serve.

Anne Borden King’s 2021 conversation with John Summers examines applied behavior analysis (ABA), a field of behavior modification used in autism services. Summers describes how lobbying and insurance funding helped make ABA the default service for many families and drew private equity into the industry. That history is a warning for dog training: once an industry helps write the rules, it can use those rules to defend the very practices people are challenging.

You cannot use pain as a teaching tool. You cannot use fear as a shortcut. You cannot use intimidation and call it communication. You cannot shock, choke, pinch, flood, or frighten a dog into compliance and call that professional training.

Freezing the compromise means the law takes the industry’s current unresolved middle ground, the polite, credentialed, aversive-tolerant middle, and makes it official.

And if the compromise becomes law, then the more humane position can start to look extreme.

Did we help your dog feel safer, or did we make their distress harder to see? A system that rewards compliance can miss that difference just as a dramatic training video can. Demanding robotic obedience without addressing emotional and cognitive needs can lead to compromised welfare, even when relying exclusively on positive reinforcement. A license should not make it harder for a guardian to question what happened to their dog.

A general business license and a guardian’s consent do not establish that a practice is humane. Calling a facility licensed does not tell us what the dogs inside it are allowed to experience.

The welfare science and professional guidance should inform how we care for dogs. The measure of progress is whether dogs and people are safer, those affected have meaningful support and power, and the conditions sustaining abuse are changed.

I oppose these bills because of the harm they would make official. I won’t accept police or military abuse as the price of protecting other dogs.

No exemptions. No excuses.

Ask Senator Nilsa Cruz-Perez and Assemblywoman Carol Murphy to oppose A4206/S4576 and A4207 in their current forms. The prepared email explains why these proposals should not advance as written. You can write from outside New Jersey, too.

If you live in New Jersey, you can also find your own state legislators and ask them to oppose these proposals.

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